Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method
Author(s): Alon Confino
Source: The American Historical Review , Dec., 1997, Vol. 102, No. 5 (Dec., 1997), pp.
1386-1403
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2171069
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AHR Forum
Collective Memory and Cultural History:
Problems of Method
ALON CONFINO
THE CONCEPT OF "CULTURE" HAS BECOME FOR HISTORIANS a compass of a sort that
governs questions of interpretation, explanation, and method. And the notion of
"memory" has taken its place now as a leading term, recently perhaps the leading
term, in cultural history. Used with various degrees of sophistication, the notion of
memory, more practiced than theorized, has been used to denote very different
things, which nonetheless share a topical common denominator: the ways in which
people construct a sense of the past.' It has been used to explore, first, the memory
of people who actually experienced a given event, such as the memory of Holocaust
survivors.2 In addition, it has come to denote the representation of the past and the
making of it into a shared cultural knowledge by successive generations in "vehicles
of memory" such as books, films, museums, commemorations, and others.3 The
richness of memory studies is undeniable. Perhaps collective memory has been so
I should like to thank Edward Ayers, Francesca Fiorani, and Sophia Rosenfeld for their insightful
critical advice.
1 Also in cases where the use of memory has been insignificant in terms of method and theory, the
memory perspective itself has proved to be thought provoking. Take, for example, the recent debate on
post-Zionism in Israel, where a group of scholars, called "the new historians," has questioned Zionist
historiography's most cherished assumptions. The scholars have criticized, among others, the myth of
the heroic birth of Israel, Zionism's repression of the Palestinian tragedy, and, more generally, the
reduction of historical studies in Israel to an ideological and educational tool of Zionism. These and
other claims opened a public debate by scholars and laypersons about the historical meaning of
Zionism. At the center of the rethinking of Zionist history has been the term "memory." As Anita
Shapira, a leading historian of Zionism and a critic of the "new historians" observed, "the debate is less
about historiography than it is about collective memory." But the notion of memory has been used
either perfunctorily or as a hollow metaphor defining memory as a monolith in expressions like "the
collective memory of early statehood" or "Palestinian collective memory." In terms of method, the
debate has centered on the actions, ideology, and motivation of institutions and leading figures, while
a social and cultural history of memory's construction and reception has not been taken, as well as the
interrelations among different memories within and between Israeli and Palestinian societies. These
topics still await their historians. For a good introduction to the post-Zionist controversy, see History
and Memory 7 (Spring/Summer 1995): "Special Issue on Israeli Historiography Revisited," especially
Anita Shapira, "Politics and Collective Memory: The Debate over the 'New Historians' in Israel," 9-34;
and Ilan Pappe, "Critique and Agenda: The Post-Zionist Scholars in Israel," 66-90. For a collection of
essays about the recent historical disputes in Israel, see Robert Wistrich and David Ohana, eds., The
Shaping of Israeli Identity: Myth, Memory, and Trauma (London, 1995).
2 The literature is enormous. See, for example, Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins
of Memory (New Haven, Conn., 1991); Ronald Berger, Constructing a Collective Memory of the
Holocaust: A Life History of Two Brothers' Survival (Niwot, 1995).
3 The term "vehicles of memory" is used by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and
Jewish Memory (New York, 1989). Pierre Nora's magisterial seven-volume collection Les lieux de
1386
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Collective Memory and Cultural History 1387
useful to think about how people construct pasts because of its open-endedness,
because it is applicable to historical situations and human conditions in diverse
societies and periods.
But the benefit of richness cannot overcome a sense that the term "memory" is
depreciated by surplus use, while memory studies lack a clear focus and have
become somewhat predictable. The often-made contention that the past is constructed
not as fact but as myth to serve the interest of a particular community may
still sound radical to some, but it cannot (and should not) stupefy most historians.
The history of memory, in fact, has developed into a fragmented field. It lacks
critical reflection on method and theory, as well as a systematic evaluation of the
field's problems, approaches, and objects of study. It is largely defined now in terms
of topics of inquiry. Repressed memory. Monuments. Films. Museums. Mickey
Mouse. Memory of the American South. Of the Holocaust. The French Revolution.
Memory of recent events. Of current events. And instant memory of yesterday's
news.4 One cannot avoid a sense that the choice of subjects is all too often governed
by the fashion of the day. The history of memory defined topically becomes a field
with neither a center nor connections among topics. It runs the danger of becoming
an assemblage of distinct topics that describe in a predictable way how people
construct the past.5
Of course, everything is a memory case; memory is everywhere. We construct a
memoire provides a cornucopia of memory sites: Les lieux de memoire, Vol. 1: La republique, Vols. 2-4:
La nation, Vol. 5-7: Les France (Paris, 1984-92).
4 See, for example, Frederick Crews, The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute (New York, 1995);
James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, Conn., 1993);
Miriam Hansen, "'Schindler's List' Is Not Shoah: The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism,
and Public Memory," Critical Inquiry 22 (Winter 1996): 292-312; Diane Barthel, Historic Preservation:
Collective Memory and Historical Identity (New Brunswick, N.J., 1996); Daniel Sherman, "Objects of
Memory: History and Narrative in French War Museums," French Historical Studies 19 (Spring 1995):
49-74; Michael Wallace, Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory (Philadelphia,
1996); Southem Cultures 2 (Fall 1995), special issue on memory and the South; Keith Wilson, ed.,
Forging the Collective Memory: Government and International Historians through Two World Wars
(Providence, R.I., 1996).
For recent, current, and instant history of memory, see Barbie Zelizer, Covering the Body: The
Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory (Chicago, 1992); Thomas
Johnson, The Rehabilitation of Richard Nixon: The Media's Effect on Collective Memory (New York,
1996); Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct
the Past (New York, 1992); Edward Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, eds., History Wars: The Enola Gay
and Other Battles for the American Past (New York, 1996).
S Lynn Hunt warned several years ago against the danger of defining the new cultural history
topically: "Just as social history sometimes moved from one group to another (workers, women,
children, ethnic groups, the old, the young) without developing much sense of cohesion and interaction
between topics, so too a cultural history defined topically could degenerate into an endless search for
new cultural practices to describe, whether carnivals, cat massacres, or impotence trials." See Hunt,
"Introduction," in The New Cultural History, Lynn Hunt, ed. (Berkeley, Calif., 1989), 9. The history of
memory faces a similar danger.
I was reminded of memory studies when I recently read Jacques Revel's critical evaluation of social
history: "'Classical' social history was mainly conceived as a history of social entities .. . As a result,
when one looks through the enormous mass of results accumulated over the past thirty or forty years,
one has a certain sense of deja vu and stagnant categories. From one work to the next, the characters
are the same though the cast may vary." Memory studies could also end up being predictable, as yet
another memory is subjected to an analysis of its construction, appropriation, contestation. Jacques
Revel, "Microanalysis and the Construction of the Social," in Histories: French Constructions of the Past,
Revel and Lynn Hunt, eds. (New York, 1995), 498.
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1388 Alon Confino
sense of the past from the most
as from the most sacred totems (t
memory case in the same way. Beyond proposing new topics for memory investigation,
we need to question the methods of memory studies, by way of refining our
approaches and proposing new connections. This essay is an occasion for critical
reflection on memory studies and on the field that defines it: cultural history. It is
not necessary to state here the advantages of cultural history, but it is perhaps
beneficial to remind ourselves of the risks and problems it includes in terms of
evidence and in relating the cultural to the social and the political. There is too
often a facile mode of doing cultural history, whereby one picks a historical event
or a vehicle of memory, analyzes its representation or how people perceived it over
time, and draws conclusions about "memory" (or "collective memory"). Memory is
a new field of research, but this is not sufficient to make of it a novelty. As a field
of study, memory has a label more than a content; that is, though the label is an
attractive one, in itself memory does not offer any true additional explanatory
power. Only when linked to historical questions and problems, via methods and
theories, can memory be illuminating. The aim of this essay is not to propose an
alternative strategy, for there is no one, correct way to "do" memory. It is, rather,
to think through how it is effective to think with memory. At the center of the essay
is the problem of how the term "memory" can be useful in articulating the
connections between the cultural, the social, and the political, between representation
and social experience.
I THINK ABOUT THE STUDY OF MEMORY by associating it with two bodies of work: t
history of mentalites and the work of a European scholar who in the 1920s was
among the first to use the concept of collective memory. I mean Aby Warburg, the
great art and cultural historian. I do not suggest that we follow on the heels of these
works. Not at all. I view them rather as inspiring us to think about the notion of
memory, to establish new relations, to suggest new strategies. Certainly, there are
other bodies of work that can illuminate the history of memory; but, for the purpose
of this essay, I found these two useful in articulating several problems of method
that exist in memory studies. I therefore begin this essay by discussing the
connections between the history of memory, of mentalites, and Warburg, before I
analyze questions of method.
The study of memory and the history of mentalit6s appear to share a common
purpose and agenda, as well as a sense of fashionableness and crisis. If we replace
"mentalite' with "memory," then Jacques Le Goff's opening paragraph to a 1974
article, "Mentalities: A History of Ambiguities," could just as well have been the
beginning of this essay: "For the historian today, the term mentality is still a novelty
and already devalued by excessive use. There is much talk of the history of
mentalities, but convincing examples of such history are rare. It represents a new
area of research, a trail to be blazed, and yet, at the same time, doubts are raised
as to its scientific, conceptual, and epistemological validity. Fashion has seized upon
it, and yet it seems already to have gone out of fashion. Should we revive or bury
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Collective Memory and Cultural History 1389
the history of mentalities?"6 Familiar music. Similar to the study of memory, the
history of mentalites was denounced as a "semantic prestidigitation."7 Like the
history of mentalites, a great appeal of the history of memory appears to be its
vagueness.8 And both histories have by themselves no additional explanatory value;
their value depends on the problems posed and methods used.9
But the history of mentalites is useful not only in order to outline the dangers
faced by the new history of memory. There is also a great advantage in thinking of
the history of memory as the history of collective mentality. This way of reasoning
resists the topical definition of the field and, conversely, uses memory to explore
broader questions about the role of the past in society. The history of memory is
useful and interesting not only for thinking about how the past is represented in,
say, a single museum but also about, more extensively, the historical mentality of
people in the past, about the commingled beliefs, practices, and symbolic representations
that make people's perceptions of the past. This kind of history of
memory should aim at "reconstructing the patterns of behavior, expressive forms
and modes of silence into which worldviews and collective sensibilities are
translated. The basic elements of this research are representations and images,
myths and values recognized or tolerated by groups or the entire society, and which
constitute the content of collective psychologies." These words, which articulate so
well an agenda for the history of memory, are Robert Mandrou's analytical
description of the history of mentalit6s.10
Moreover, memory as a study of collective mentality provides a comprehensive
view of culture and society that is often missing in the history of memory, whose
fragmentary tendency is to focus on distinct memories. The history of mentality
distinguished itself from the history of ideas by looking at the common man. This
included both examining objects produced by the common man (popular literature,
for example) and studying the reception by the common man of objects of high
culture (say, Shakespeare). It attempted, in theory if not in practice, to outline the
mental horizons of society as a whole, to link both Shakespeare and popular
literature within a single cultural world. This is a useful corrective for the history o
memory, a field that is inclined, as we shall see, to isolate memories instead of
6 Jacques Le Goff, "Mentalities: A History of Ambiguities," in Constructing the Past: Essays in
Historical Methodology, Le Goff and Pierre Nora, eds. (New York, 1984), 166. It was first published as
"Les mentalites: Une histoire ambigue," in Faire de l'histoire, Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, eds.,
vol. 3 (Paris, 1974).
7 Franqois Furet, "Beyond the Annales," Journal of Modem History 55 (September 1983): 405.
8 The French history of mentalite was justifiably criticized on grounds that it, first, tended to view
every historical problem as a psychological problem and second, reduce categories of mentality to soc
analysis (of hierarchy, income, occupation), a method that reduced beliefs and values to a sbcial
structure established a priori. See Carlo Ginzburg, "A proposito della raccolta dei saggi storici di Ma
Bloch," Studi medievali 3 (1965): 335-53; and Roger Chartier, "Intellectual History or Sociocultur
History? The French Trajectories," in Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, Domini
LaCapra and Steven Kaplan, eds. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982), 13-46, esp. 22-32. For a critical appraisal, se
also Patrick Hutton, "The History of Mentalities: The New Map of Cultural History," History an
Theory 20 (1981): 237-59.
9 This has been Furet's argument about the study of mentalities. I found Furet's critique of th
history of mentality insightful for my thinking about memory. See Furet, "Beyond the Annales,"
404-07.
10 Robert Mandrou, "Histoire/L'histoire des mentalites," in Encyclopaedia universalis (1971
edn., Paris, 1985), 9: 366.
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1390 Alon Confino
placing them in relation to one another and to society as a whole. This approach
heightens our awareness of the fact that collective memory is an exploration of a
shared identity that unites a social group, be it a family or a nation, whose members
nonetheless have different interests and motivations. And of the fact that the
crucial issue in the history of memory is not how a past is represented but why it was
received or rejected. For every society sets up images of the past. Yet to make a
difference in a society, it is not enough for a certain past to be selected. It must steer
emotions, motivate people to act, be received; in short, it must become a
socio-cultural mode of action. Why is it that some pasts triumph while others fail?
Why do people prefer one image of the past over another? The answers to these
questions lead us to formulate hypotheses and perhaps draw conclusions about
historical mentality. And to articulate such answers, the work of Aby Warburg is
insightful.
Aby Warburg (1866-1929) used but never developed systematically the notion of
social memory (soziales Geddchtnis).11 His work focused on the transmission of
primitive and ancient motifs to later societies, especially their influence and
meaning in Renaissance Florence. All human products, argued Warburg, and
artistic work in particular, were expressions of human memory transmitted through
symbols from ancient times. He came to believe that the key to deciphering art and
culture lay in tracing the collective memory of primitive, primeval beliefs and
responses that continued to shape our world through shared symbols.
Warburg's ideas of memory are interesting in themselves. More consequential to
this essay is his approach to art and cultural history emphasizing the connection
between artistic representation and the social world. Warburg's studies explored
what is nowadays called the history of mentality or collective memory. Warburg
read widely in anthropology and social psychology. Like a historical anthropologist,
he observed the Other to gain insights into his own, modern culture; in 1895, he
traveled among the Hopi Indians in New Mexico and recorded their rituals and
11 For Warburg's idea of social memory, see Kurt Forster, "Aby Warburg's History of Art: Collective
Memory and the Social Mediation of Images," Daedalus (Winter 1976): 169-76; E. H. Gombrich, Aby
Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, 2d edn. (Chicago, 1986), 239-59. Gombrich presents Warburg's
fragmented notion of social memory but does not attempt to provide a comprehensive view. For a
critical evaluation of Gombrich's book, see Felix Gilbert, "From Art History to the History of
Civilization: Aby Warburg," Journal of Modem History 44 (1972): 381-91.
Seventy years after Warburg's death, his writings are still unavailable in English. Fortunately, Kurt
Forster is now preparing the English edition of Warburg's collected writings (Gesammelte Schriften
[Leipzig-Berlin, 1932]), to be published in the Getty Research Institute's book series Texts and
Documents. For a selection of Warburg's essays and several critical appraisals of his work, see Dieter
Wuttke, ed., Aby Warburg: Ausgewalte Schriften und Wurdigungen (Baden-Baden, 1980). For some
evaluations of Warburg's notions of culture and art history, see Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and
Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History (New Haven, Conn., 1989); Yoshihiko Maikuma, Der Begriff der
Kultur bei Warburg, Nietzsche und Burckhardt (Konigstein, 1985); Kurt Forster, "Aby Warburg: His
Study of Ritual and Art on Two Continents," October 77 (Summer 1996): 6-24. For an attempted
feminist, poststructuralist, and psychoanalytic reading of Warburg, see Margaret Iverson, "Retrieving
Warburg's Tradition," Art History 16 (December 1993): 541-53. On the reception of Warburg's
writings, see Michael Diers, "Warburg and the Warburgian Tradition of Cultural History," New
German Critique 65 (Spring-Summer 1995): 59-74. On his projected picture atlas of memory, which he
called Mnemosyne, and which included photographs and reproductions of recurring human figures and
gestures, see Dorothee Bauerle, Gespenstergeschichten fir ganz Erwachsene: Ein Kommentar zu Aby
Warburgs Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (Miinster, 1988).
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Collective Memory and Cultural History 1391
ceremonies.12 For Warburg, the historian of artistic production must take cognizance
of two intertwining factors. One is the "full spectrum of artifacts" (the
context, in other words) in a given culture and the ensuing relationship of artifacts
both to one another and to their surroundings.13 The work of art represents the life
of the period and its needs; to interpret it, we need "to reconstruct the connection
between artistic representations and the social experiences, taste, and mentality of
a specific society.'14 The second is the peculiarity of the individual work of art.
Looking at the whole, Warburg attempted to maintain a coherent balance between
the way a work of art eventuated in the specific form and quality it did and its
connection with the larger culture around it.
This mode of proceeding has enormous potential to the study of memory by
reversing a recent trend whereby, as we shall see, a representation of the past (in,
say, a museum, a film, or a commemoration) is not placed within the symbolic
universe available to the society. The result is studies of memory in symbolic
isolation. I would like to view memory as an outcome of the relationship between
a distinct representation of the past and the full spectrum of symbolic representations
available in a given culture. This view posits the study of memory as the
relationship between the whole and its component parts, seeing society as a global
entity-social, symbolic, political-where different memories interact. This approach
also seeks to reconstruct the meaning of a given collective memory by using
an intertwined, double move: placing it within a global historical context and a
global symbolic universe, and analyzing the ideas, values, and practices embedded
in and symbolized by its particular imagery.
Of special significance is Warburg's approach to the issue of evidence. He
rejected the arbitrary selection of evidence by art historians who believed in the
autonomy of aesthetic values, which he judged as pure history of ideas that
disconnected the individual work of art from the larger politics and society. He also
rejected the selection of evidence by proponents of the formalist approach
(characterized by Heinrich W6lfflin's 1888 Renaissance and Baroque), which
explained art history in terms of the development and transmission of shapes, lines
colors, and subjects, for this approach interpreted the symbols and meaning of art
too narrowly. To carry out his art historical method, Warburg used the concept of
response, emphasizing the importance of social mediation of images. The theory of
response called for a study of those prevailing customs, tastes, and traditions that
connected the historical conditions with the artistic representation. When we
interpret a work of art, we cannot assume that images are the transparent
expressions of political and social values, for in fact artistic style is a most
treacherous key for ascertaining political and social developments. In short, the
work of art cannot speak for itself; to decipher its meaning, we must examine
intermediaries between the social world and the artistic representation.
12 Peter Burke, "Aby Warburg as Historical Anthropologist," in Aby Warburg: Akten des internationalen
Symposiums Hamburg 1990, Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers, and Charlotte Schoell-Glass, eds.
(Weinheim, 1991), 39-44; Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York, 1995), 209-14; Ron
Chernow, The Warburgs (New York, 1993), 64-66.
13 Forster, "Aby Warburg's History of Art," 172.
14 Carlo Ginzburg, "From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method," in Clues, Myths,
and the Historical Method (Baltimore, Md., 1992), 21.
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1392 Alon Confino
Warburg's approach is useful in warning us against the danger of assuming that
the representation of memory can speak for itself, without intermediaries. Studies
that focus on the representation of memory, while ignoring social practice and
transmission, implicitly make an assumption, as we shall see, that the representation
is a transparent expression of a historical mentality, of social and political values. In
reality, the crucial issue is not what is represented but how this representation has
been interpreted and perceived.
In the 1920s, Warburg was not the only one thinking of social memory and the
history of mentality. Maurice Halbwachs, the French sociologist, was the first to
have used the concept of collective memory systematically. In a series of studies,
Halbwachs argued that every memory is carried by a specific social group limited in
space and time.15 His approach was very different from Warburg's. And although
Halbwachs' fundamental contribution-establishing the connection between a
social group and collective memory-is the starting point for every scholar of
memory, Warburg's writings are, I believe, no less suggestive in terms of method.
Also active at the same time was, of course, Marc Bloch, who explored in his 1924
classic Les rois thaumaturges the "beliefs and fables" around royal healing rites.16
Bloch and, it appears, also Warburg knew of Halbwachs' work.17 What kind of an
intellectual genealogy existed between a sociologist, a historian, and an art historian
who shared the notion of memory and the history of culture is an investigation that
still awaits its scholar.
How, exactly, are Warburg and the history of mentality useful to the study of
memory? I see three areas of convergence, which have already been alluded to: the
connection of the political with the social in the history of memory, the issue of
reception and evidence, and the relationship among memories within a given
society. I would like to discuss these topics critically by analyzing several excellent
studies on memory. In accordance with the principle that one should direct criticism
at leading books in the field, I have chosen those books that I found insightful and
stimulating. In the short space of this essay, I cannot possibly claim to do justice to
these studies; I therefore ask the reader to bear in mind the rather limited nature
of my investigation. Still, I believe that the characteristics I shall discuss are
representative of the current study of memory.
15 Maurice Halbwachs, La topographie legendaire des Evangiles en Terre sainte: Etude de memoire
collective (Paris, 1941); Les cadres sociaux de la memoire (Paris, 1925). In English, see Halbwachs, On
Collective Memory, Lewis Coser, ed. and trans. (Chicago, 1992); and The Collective Memory, Francis
Ditter and Vida Yazdi Ditter, trans. (New York, 1980). On Halbwachs' formulation and use of
collective memory, see Patrick Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover, N.H., 1993), chap. 4.
16 Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France (London,
1973), 4.
17 Halbwachs received after World War I a Chair of Pedagogy and Sociology at the University of
Strasbourg, where he began a close professional friendship with Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. When
Bloch and Febvre founded the Annales d'histoire economique et sociales in 1929, Halbwachs became a
member of the editorial board. See Coser, "Introduction," in Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 5-11.
About the relation between Warburg and Halbwachs we know very little. See Jan Assmann, "Collective
Memory and Cultural Identity," New Gernan Critique 65 (Spring-Summer 1995): 125.
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Collective Memory and Cultural History 1393
ONE OF THE SIGNIFICANT CONTRIBUTIONS OF MEMORY STUDIES has
the construction of the past, through a process of invention and appropriation,
affected the relationship of power within society. The "politics of memory" (at
times, "the politics of identity") has emerged as a leading theme in the growing
body of literature about memory. Memory is viewed here as a subjective experience
of a social group that essentially sustains a relationship of power. Simply stated, it
is who wants whom to remember what, and why.18 This theme is no doubt
illuminating to our understanding of the functions and meanings of collective
memory. But it seems to me only partially illuminating, for one consequence of it
is the tendency to reduce memory, which is fundamentally a concept of culture, to
the political.
The problem with memory defined in terms of politics and political use is that it
becomes an illustrative reflection of political development and often is relativized
to ideology. In The Past in French History, Robert Gildea seeks to "explore the
relationship between political culture and collective memory," and he views French
political cultures as "defined around the main axes of political conflict." Collective
memory thus turns out to be the political memory of liberalism, socialism,
communism, anarchism, regionalism, Catholicism. Significantly, the political memory
described by Gildea is one constructed by party and institutional leaders, amon
intellectuals, journalists, statesmen, politicians, and publicists. Consequently, when
Gildea argues, for example-"The 'making of the working class' in France did not
take place as a result of industrialisation or urbanisation but as a result of the
construction of a collective memory, the myth of the Paris Commune ... as a class
war, a proletarian revolution suppressed with unprecedented violence by the
French bourgeoisie" -one is not sure in what ways "collective memory" is different
from ideology.19
More important, the result of memory being sacrificed to an analysis of politics
and political use is, often, to ignore the category of the social. In this case,
representations of the past derive from and are mainly used to explain relationships
of political nature, but they are considerably silent about the effect of memory o
the organization, hierarchization, and arrangements of social and cultural relationships.
An illuminating example of this problem is Henry Rousso's acclaimed book
The Vichy Syndrome, a study of the memory of Vichy in post-1945 French society.20
The first and major part of the book, "Evolution of the Syndrome," is a useful
description of the various ways in which the Vichy memory was mobilized for
political purposes. Rousso's narrative follows the "unfinished mourning" after
Liberation, the "repression" of the 1950s and 1960s, the turning point of 1968, the
films The Sorrow and the Pity (Le chagrin et la pitie, 1971) and Shoah (1985), and,
after 1974, the Jewish and gentile "obsession" with Vichy and the Holocaust. This
is an important story, historically, politically, and morally, told with verve and
clarity.
But whose memory is it? Similar to Gildea's, this is a memory constructed by
18 Peter Burke poses this question in his discussion of social amnesia. See Burke, "History as Social
Memory," in Memory: History, Culture and the Mind, Thomas Butler, ed. (New York, 1989), 108.
19 Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven, Conn., 1994), 9-10, 44.
20 Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, Arthur Goldhammer,
trans. (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
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1394 Alon Confino
politicians and intellectuals: Charles de Gaulle, the Communist Party, Shoah
filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, members of the Chamber of Deputies, historians,
journalists, or Andre Mairaux speaking at the ceremony for Jean Moulin at the
Pantheon. The Vichy Syndrome shows a very important manifestation of French
memory, yet it is a limited one; this is largely a public, often official, and narrowly
political memory. The period of repression, 1954-1971, for example, is predictably
centered on the figure of de Gaulle. But if in Rousso the Vichy memory appears to
have been repressed between 1954 and 1971, it is also because the book explores a
memory created from above. It ignores the construction of popular memories of
Vichy and their links to the everyday level of experience. In the private spheres of
family, friends, workplace, and neighborhood, there may have been very different
representations of Vichy. Robert Moeller has convincingly argued recently that
German society during the 1950s, in contrast to the widely held opinion of scholars
and laypersons, did not forget or repress the Nazi era but actively remembered
it-selectively and with an inverted meaning of who the victim really was.21 It is
improbable that the mass of French men and women who collaborated with the
Nazis, some out of opportunism, others out of ideology, simply forgot it all. The
Vichy Syndrome thus fails to give a sense of how the Vichy memory made a
difference in people's lives, and how it was enacted on the local and private level.
Moreover, while Rousso ignores popular Vichy memories that were produced away
from the corridors of political, cultural, and entertainment power, he also fails to
explore how the memory constructed by the powerful-say, the Moulin commemoration-was
received by the people. (We will return to this topic below.)
Consequently, the Vichy memory from above is isolated from larger patterns of
historical mentality in French society. As a study of memory from above, The Vichy
Syndrome cannot be considered, as it aspires to be, a study of collective memory.
By sanctifying the political while underplaying the social, and by sacrificing the
cultural to the political, we transform memory into a "natural" corollary of political
development and interests.22 Consequently, we are the poorer in method and theory
to analyze crucial memory issues that cannot be reduced to the political: the
relations between modernity (and postmodernity) and memory; the obsession with
and/or neglect of memory, forgetting, and conservation in modern and premodern
societies. Furthermore, one unfortunate side effect of treating memory as a
21 Robert Moeller, "War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany
AHR 101 (October 1996): 1008-48. The narrative trajectory of Holocaust and World War II mem
as one of repression (1950s-60s), awakening (sometime during the 1960s), obsession (the 1970s a
after) has an air of predictability. A common argument about Holocaust remembrance in Israel, fo
example, is that the Adolf Eichmann trial was the watershed between survivors' repression and st
indifference before 1961 and growing interest and instrumentalization of the Holocaust later on.
this argument is correct only insofar as we explore the official state level. In everyday life, the Holoca
was everywhere between 1945 and 1961. The fundamental division in Israeli society between those w
came from "there" and those who were "here" was often represented in small gestures, as whe
survivor's number on the arm drew hisses and furtive glances or when a survivor's behavior was excus
with the explanation, "Well, he was there." So far, this aspect has been captured better by writers t
by historians. See the novel by David Grossman, See Under: Love, Betsy Rosenberg, trans. (New Yor
1989), and especially the masterful first story, "Momik."
22 My argument is not, in case such a clarification is needed, against every exploration of the politic
The study of the political is fundamental because it allows cultural history to link with power and t
avoid being a rendition of the old history of ideas. My critique is of the particular mode of cultu
history that reduces power to politics, and the political to top-down, public, and official manifestation
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Collective Memory and Cultural History 1395
symptom of politics is the lack of explorations of power in areas that are not
politically evident. Consequently, a search for memory traces is made mostly among
visible places and familiar names, where memory construction is explicit and its
meaning palpably manipulated, while in fact we should look for memory where it is
implied rather than said, blurred rather than clear, in the realm of collective
mentality. We miss a whole world of human activities that cannot be immediately
recognized (and categorized) as political, although they are decisive to the way
people construct and contest images of the past. We can think of the family,
voluntary association, and workplace but should also include practices such as
tourism and consumerism.
Interestingly enough, by sacrificing the cultural to the political, memory studiesand
by extension cultural history-has reproduced a model of society that is, in a
sense, not dissimilar from that of the social history of the 1960s and 1970s.
According to classic social history, cultural cleavages necessarily reflected social
differences constructed beforehand; the social structure identified and explained
cultural originations that subsequently needed only to be characterized. The
underlying assumption was that culture can only be explained by its relation to
social structural preconditions, thus changes in the formation of culture are
explained by earlier changes in social relation. Cultural history has justifiably
demolished the validity of this approach by arguing that culture shapes, as much it
is shaped by, the social structure. But if social history reduced the cultural to the
social, cultural history often reduces the cultural to the political. Memory cleavages
reflect political differences constructed beforehand. Political differences identify
and explain memory origination. Memory thus becomes a prisoner of political
reductionism and functionalism.
THERE IS ANOTHER SIGNIFICANT CONSEQUENCE to the sacrificing of the cultural to the
political, namely that we tend to ignore the issue of reception, that ogre that awaits
every cultural historian. Many studies of memory are content to describe the
representation of the past without bothering to explore the transmission, diffusion,
and, ultimately, the meaning of this representation. The study of reception is not an
issue that simply adds to our knowledge. Rather, it is a necessary one to avoid an
arbitrary choice and interpretation of evidence.
Let us look again at The Vichy Syndrome, which treats the history of transmission
at length. The second part of the book, "Transmission of the Syndrome," focuses on
three memory carriers: official commemorations, popular movies, and scholarly
works of history. In addition, to gauge "how deep were the roots of the syndrome
in French society," Rousso discusses book sales, movie attendance, and polling
results.23 But there is no comprehensive analysis of the diffusion of Vichy
representations or a clear rationale for why one piece of evidence is chosen over
another.24 Moreover, however elaborate the polling results are, and however
23 Rousso, Vichy Syndrome, 272.
24 Rousso does not provide in his discussion of transmission any new information that was not
already discussed in Part 1 about the evolution of the syndrome. We only get more of the same-more
films, more books, more commemorations-though it is unclear what are the criteria according to
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1396 Alon Confino
complete the information about box-office sales of The Sorrow and the Pity and book
sales of Robert Paxton's Vichy France, this superficial evidence cannot capture the
meaning of the Vichy memory for French men and women. The evidence presented
is anecdotal, and the anecdote is presented as proof of reception. The anecdotal
approach appears to be confirmed by Rousso's own evaluation of his method as an
attempt to "capture the full diversity of 'collective memory' by recording all its
visible signs."25 "All the visible signs": one wonders how arbitrary is Rousso's Vichy
syndrome.26 Parallel to the visible representations there were perhaps different
Vichy syndromes that can be found among silent and less visible sources. For the
Vichy syndrome, like other pathologies, was created to hide as much as to reveal.
The book's main metaphors-syndrome, neurosis, repression, obsession, pathology-are
taken from psychology. But if we think further with the psycholog
metaphor, we must wonder whether the historian/psychologist should take the
patient's (French society) explicit utterances as a priori important, indeed almost at
face value. Should the historian not be suspicious of the visible, explicit narrative
offered by public and official French society about Vichy? My argument is not that
Rousso interprets the visible evidence naively; on the contrary, he is sensitive to
silences, appropriations, lies. It is rather that Rousso interprets only the visible
evidence: as a result, he interprets the Vichy syndrome within the constraints of
public, and to a large extent official, narrative. Should we not assume, instead, that
the patient would try to conceal the effects and implication of the trauma, that the
visible signs of a trauma are at times the least meaningful?27
The real problem is one of method: the decision to explain the meaning of the
Vichy memory by separating its construction (Part 1 of the book) from its reception
(Part 2). Rousso interprets reception by attempting "not to lose sight of the overall
picture" of the syndrome's evolutionary stages established in Part 1 (from unfinished
mourning to obsession).28 The result is an interpretation that is closed within
itself-because the reception's "overall picture" has already been predetermined.
The discussion of reception thus only shows what we have already learned in Part
1 and in fact has no bearing on the evolution of the syndrome. This method is an
interpretative vicious circle in which Rousso reads into the evidence of reception
what he has already learned from other sources and what he wants to "prove."29
which a source (say, de Gaulle's memoirs) is used to interpret the construction of the syndrome (Part
1) rather than its reception (Part 2).
25 Rousso, Vichy Syndrome, 219, emphasis added.
26 The danger of looking for evidence in the most visible places is clear when Rousso explains his
choice of method in exploring the depth of the syndrome in French society: "Before 1971 ... polling
. . . [about World War II's issues] was practically non-existent. Since polling data are essential for what
I want to do here, I have focused in what follows on the 1970s and 1980s" (Rousso, Vichy Syndrome,
272-73). Instead of posing a problem-how French men and women remembered Vichy-and looking
for the answer everywhere, Rousso viewed polling data, which as a source should be a vehicle to
establish an argument, as the essential factor, and looked for the answer where polling data existed.
This is a little bit like looking for a lost coin under the lamppost because there is light there.
27 The status of evidence in the history of memory has been so far ignored, although this is a crucial
issue. See the discussion of James Wilkinson, "A Choice of Fictions: Historians, Memory, and
Evidence," Publications of the Modem Language Association 111 (January 1996): 80-92, who has a
favorable view of Rousso's method.
28 Rousso, Vichy Syndrome, 221.
29 Rousso, Vichy Syndrome, 221. Rousso himself is conscious of this problem when he writes of his
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Collective Memory and Cultural Histoty 1397
When historians attempt to interpret evidence of memory from
the past, the risk of a circular argumentation through "cultural" reading is high. The
overall consequence is an arbitrary interpretation: a conception of the meaning of
Vichy memory was formed before exploring the reception of the memory. But in
truth, we have no way to evaluate, control, and verify the importance of the
evidence without a systematic study of reception, and we end up constructing the
history of memory from visible signs whose significance is taken for granted.
Although neither Rousso nor scholars of memory and cultural history believe that
representations of the past can "speak for themselves," the result of many studies
of memory that overlook reception is that representations of the past are used, in
effect, as vehicles that explain perceptions of the past without intermediaries.
ONE RESULT OF THE SEPARATE NARRATIVES of evolution and reception, a result
certainly unintended by Rousso, is that the evolution of memory stands like a
foundational story against which reception is measured. The separate narratives
thus assume levels of analysis and explanations: we must first construct the
evolution of memory in order to understand its meaning as revealed in reception.
But this, of course, is an artificial separation, for the meaning of memory's evolution
commingles with, and is dependent on, the story of its reception.
A similar problem of narrative emerges when we attempt to write the history of
memory by separating its construction from its contestation. This is the case of Yael
Zerubavel's Recovered Roots, an excellent, thoughtful study of Zionist collective
memory.30 Zerubavel focuses on three major events in ancient and recent Jewish
history: the fall of Masada in AD 73, the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Roman
Empire in AD 132, and the 1920 battle of Tel Hai, in the Upper Galilee, where eight
Zionist settlers died defending a small settlement.
The first parts of the book explore the evolution of these events into fundamental
myths that shaped meanings of the past in the Jewish society in Palestine. Although
the sources are extremely rich, Jewish society is presented as a monolith.31 There is
no differentiation in culture, society, and politics regarding who are the agents of
"Zionist collective memory." The term itself takes on a life of its own, as it acts,
reconstructs, and produces.32 The result is a cultural history in a social and political
void; the construction of memory here is a story bereft of its sociology and its
politics.
Only in the last part of the book, "the politics of commemoration," which
explores "the struggle over power and control," does Zerubavel finally discuss how
method that it "may at times seem rather circular ... [and] is intended only as a heuristic tool." One
can identify with this argument. Still, we must be clear about the consequences of writing a history o
memory by separating memory's construction from its reception.
30 Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition
(Chicago, 1995). Among the growing Israeli discussion of memory, Zerubavel's study seems the most
comprehensive and illuminating.
31 Zerubavel makes a concerted effort, often very successful, to get to the everyday level of collective
memory. Among the sources she uses are jokes, popular songs, public school textbooks, plays, poems,
children's stories, and the experience of trips to Masada and Tel Hai.
32 See, for example, Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, 18, 30, 31, 96.
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1398 Alon Confino
the "different interpretations of tho
on Israeli collective memory."33 But a
of the construction of memory? Why assume, even as a heuristic device, that a
"Zionist collective memory" existed, when in fact many memories vied for power
within Zionism? The result of analyzing the politics of memory as a separate
problem from that of the evolution of memory is the omission of a key problem to
understanding the construction of Zionist collective memory: how opposing Zionist
groups came to believe, in spite of their political and other differences, that they
shared a single, transcending national belonging. In other words, how did Zionists
construct from their different interpretations of Jewish history a symbolic common
denominator? The solution to these questions, in terms of narrative and method,
lies in writing the history of memory's construction as commingling with that of
memory's contestation, thus emphasizing simultaneously the politics of commemoration
and how various Zionist groups came to believe they shared a unique
national memory, one that overcame symbolically the real differences in Jewi
society. The result of the analysis of Recovered Roots is a kind of master narrative
of an agentless "Zionist collective memory" (described in the first part of the book
against which the different interpretations of Zionist groups are measured (in the
second part). The analysis of contestation thus does not influence the story of
evolution; it is not so much a part of it as an addition to it. Consequently, the impact
of contestation on the construction of memory is reduced, although Zerubavel's
intention in separating them was, I assume, the opposite.
One way to reflect about this problem of narratives-the separation of the
construction of memory from either its reception or contestation-is in terms of the
relations between text and context. The stories of the construction of Vichy and
Zionist memories function in the books much like a necessary context, which
describes and analyzes the general conditions within which a particular reality
evolves. The foundation story is complex and multifaceted, yet it provides a single
context within which, and in relation to which, people make choices about reception
and contestation. It constructs one social reality within which reception and
contestation must make sense.34 But what happens when we reject this separation
of memory's construction from its reception and contestation, when we break down
the dichotomy of text and context? This is an invitation to reject the historian's
common approach to place and explain the text in relation to a context. The resul
is, I believe, that we can pursue better the agenda of Rousso and Zerubavel to
explore "how members of society remember and interpret [the past] . . ., how the
meaning of the past is constructed, and how it is modified over time."35 To reject
the separation of narratives assumes that historical actors participate in various
processes at the same time, that they simultaneously represent, receive, and contest
33Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, xix.
34 Let me illuminate this argument with an example. In The Vichy Syndrome, the context created in
Part 1 (memory from above) conditions the exploration in Part 2 (ignoring popular construction of
memories). But why should we assume that people were limited to the memory delineated in Part 1?
Instead of exploring how people constructed their own collective memories of Vichy, which at times
concurred with and at times opposed the official memory of Vichy, Rousso investigates only how the
memory constructed by politicians and intellectuals was received by the public. Thus the Vichy memory
from above looks very much like a memory imposed on a public that has no agency.
35 Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, 3.
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Collective Memory and Cultural History 1399
memory. To accept that none of these processes has primacy and yet
the meaning of memory, we need to understand all of them as intertwinedmemory
as a whole that is bigger than the sum of its parts. This serves as a reminde
to realize what is declared more often than practiced, namely the multiplicity of
social experiences and representations, in part contradictory and ambiguous, in
terms of which people construct the world and their actions.36
This argument, in a sense, takes us back to the classic writings of Halbwachs. The
fundamental idea of The Social Formation of Memory is the "multiplicity of social
times," as Halbwachs analyzes the collective memory of, among others, the family,
the religious community, and the social class.37 He writes: "But these various modes
by which memories become associated result from the various ways in which people
can become associated. We can understand each memory as it occurs in individual
thought only if we locate each within the thought of the corresponding group. We
cannot properly understand their relative strength and the ways in which they
combine within individual thought unless we connect the individual to the various
groups of which he is simultaneously a member."138
The multiplicity of memory is useful for two reasons: in terms of method, it
enables us to write the history of memory as the commingling of reception,
representation, and contestation; in terms of subject matter, it makes it possible to
avoid artificial distinctions, even as heuristic devices, and to explore how people
were, at one and the same time, say, local and national, Zionist and religious, good
parents as well as devoted Catholics and Vichy fascists who sent Jewish children to
the camps. Furthermore, the multiplicity of memory is also useful in thinking about
the place of a given memory within the society as a whole. It is to this topic, then,
that I now turn.
I WOULD LIKE TO USE THE IDIOM OF the whole and its parts to illuminate the
relationships among memories within a given society. The history of memory should
place the articulation of a particular perception of the past within the context of
society as a shared symbolic universe. A given memory is subsumed within a culture
that is constituted by common practices and representations. National memory, for
example, is constituted by different, often opposing, memories that, in spite of their
rivalries, construct common denominators that overcome on the symbolic level real
36 My thoughts on the relation between text and context owe a debt in some measure to the work of
microhistorians who attempted to provide an alternative to the customary use of context as the
"background" of the text. See Giovanni Levi, Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist (Chicago, 1988);
and "I Pericoli del Geertzismo," Quaderni storici (1985): 269-77. And see also Revel, "Microanalysis
and the Construction of the Social," 492-502, esp. 500-01.
37 Jacques Le Goff discusses Halbwach's "multiplicity of social time" and its influence on Fernand
Braudel in History and Memory, Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman, trans. (New York, 1992), 135.
38 Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 53, emphasis added. I attempt to break the text/context
dichotomy in my analysis of local and national identities in Germany. Instead of understanding local
identity as part of national identity, and localness against the background of nationhood, I view local
identity as a constituent of national identity and localness as the symbolic representation of the nation.
My basic argument is that Germans imagined nationhood as a form of localness. See Alon Confino, The
Nation as a Local Metaphor: Wiirttemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 (Chapel
Hill, N.C., 1997). The present article is a product of my thoughts on memory following the completion
of my empirical study.
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1400 Alon Confino
social and political differences to create an imagined community. We should stress
the interaction between a given memory and other memories in the society and take
cognizance of society and culture as global entities, where distinct memories interact.
In contrast, a result of much recent research is that we explore memory in
isolation. One approach is to look at the various memories within a society without
providing a view of society and identity as a whole. Gildea adopts this approach
when he traces French collective memories-socialism, Bonapartism, anarchism,
regionalism-and concludes that "there is no single French collective memory but
parallel and competing collective memories."39 This is true, but it is only a partial
truth. It is obviously important to avoid essentialism and to reject arguments that
impose cultural homogeneity on a heterogeneous society. Conflicts over memory
exist. Differences are real. People are sometimes ready to die for their vision of the
past, and nations sometimes break because of memory conflicts. But all this only
begs the question: how, then, in spite of all these differences and difficulties, do
nations hold together? What were the common denominators that bound French
men and women across the dividing lines that separated them? Gildea's study is
sensitive to the differences in French political culture but fails to capture
representations of nationhood that create a sense of oneness among broad and
diverse groups in French society. The picture he presents is of a French collective
memory splintered into rival political cultures. But this is a one-dimensional
picture. Was there no cultural heritage and tradition (real or invented) that united
these people together as "French"? Did they not feel a sense of shared destiny?
One danger in exploring the conflicts over national representations, while
avoiding the common denominators, is that the historian may read into the
symbolic representations what he or she has already learned by other means.
Studies of conflict tend to reproduce on the symbolic level the social and political
conflicts that are familiar from previous studies. But many a national memory
succeeds to represent, for a broad section of the population, a common destiny that
overcomes symbolically real social and political conflicts in order to give the illusion
of a community to people who in fact have very different interests. People construct
representations of the nation that conceal through symbols real friction in their
society. These representations should also be studied.
Another approach is to consider the whole while ignoring its component parts.
This is, in part, the case of Zerubavel's Recovered Roots, where a "Zionist collective
memory" becomes a historical agent in its own right. When Zerubavel turns to
discuss the contestation of memory, she overwhelmingly focuses on recent decades,
although the memories of Masada, Bar Kokhba, and Tel Hai were in the making
since the first decades of the century. She argues that the Yishuv society before
independence in 1948 was less contested than "Israeli culture today that includes a
greater variety of interpretations of the past."40 As a whole, this argument is
correct, but "Zionist collective memory" of the early decades seems to be based on
a hegemonic notion of hegemony. It was, according to Zerubavel, hardly contested
39Gildea, Past in French History, 340.
40 Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, 235.
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Collective Memory and Cultural History 1401
by non-Zionist Jewish memories and only partially contested from within by
different Zionist groups. This seems rather improbable.41
Assuming for a minute that Zionist memory in the past was indeed hegemonic
and largely uncontested, then Zerubavel needs to reevaluate her argument about
the centrality of contestation: for "Zionist collective memory" appears to have been
uniquely successful in creating a consensus among different gender, political, social,
and ethnic groups in the Jewish Yishuv. Yet in order to understand this process, we
must explore how Zionists constructed a symbolic common denominator out of
different ideological beliefs and how, in essence, "Zionist collective memory"
meant different things to different people: to members of the Labor Party, to
right-wing Revisionists, to religious Zionists, and to left-wing Marxists. In
Zerubavel's narrative, instead, "Zionist collective memory," as understood by
Zionists, assumes a rather hegemonic meaning until the 1960s.
A third approach conceives the relationships among memories as dichotomous.
This is the picture that emerges from John Bodnar's study of the creation of public
memory in twentieth-century America as a product of a power struggle between
"vernacular and official memory."42 Bodnar's underlying assumptions are exemplified
in his definition of these memories. On official memory, he writes:
Official culture relies on "dogmatic formalism" and the restatement of reality in ideal rather
than complex or ambiguous terms ... Cultural leaders [the makers of official memory],
usually grounded in institutional and professional structures, envisioned a nation of dutiful
and united citizens which undertook only orderly change. These officials saw the past as a
device that could help them attain these goals and never tired of using commemoration to
restate what they thought the social order and citizen behavior should be ... By the latter
part of the twentieth century public memory remains a product of elite manipulation,
symbolic interaction, and contested discourse.43
Conversely, vernacular memory is described in the following language:
Defenders of [vernacular] cultures are numerous and intent on protecting values and
restating views of reality derived from firsthand experience in small-scale communities
rather than the "imagined" communities of a large nation ... normally vernacular
expressions convey what social reality feels like rather than what it should be like. Its very
existence threatens the sacred and timeless nature of official expressions ... [V]ernacular
memory was derived from the lived or shared experiences of small groups. Unlike official
culture which was grounded in the power of larger, long-lasting institutions.44
What a neat binary opposition between authentic vernacular culture and
manipulative official one! Bodnar idealizes vernacular memory, which he describes
in terms-shared experience, protecting values, small-scale communities-that
convey in our culture authenticity and intimacy, while he describes official memory
41 Of the three myths, only Tel Hai is presented as having a rich history of contestation reaching to
the 1930s-1940s. The analysis of the contestation of the Bar Kokhba revolt focuses on the early 1980s,
that of Masada on the 1960s and 1970s. Possibly, the paucity of contestation is linked more to the
specific cases of Masada and Bar Kokhba than to a general attribute of Zionist's construction of the
past. Other myths may reveal a different picture.
42 John Bodnar, RemakingAmerica: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth
Century (Princeton, N.J., 1992).
43 Bodnar, Remaking America, 13-14, 245, 20.
44 Bodnar, Remaking America, 14, 247.
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1402 Alon Confino
in terms-large, impersonal, power hungry-that are associated with alienation,
distrust, and ulterior motivation. Although Bodnar discusses ways in which
vernacular and official memory could blend, this dichotomy governs his analysis,
method, and conclusions. But, in the real world, things are not as neat. Not only is
vernacular memory not as saintly and official memory not as brutal, but they
constantly commingle.
Moreover, this inadequate dichotomy also governs Bodnar's analysis of the
relations between local and national memories. According to Bodnar, "the central
question for public memory will continue to be what it always has been: just how
effective will vernacular interests be in containing the cultural offensive of
authorities?"45 This, in a sense, is the wrong question because the challenge is not
so much to understand how vernacular and official memories opposed each other
but how the nation-state came to be a vernacular memory: how did people
internalize the nation and make it in a remarkably short time an everyday mental
property-a memory as intimate and authentic as the local, ethnic, and family
past?46
I HAVE PROPOSED IN THIS ESSAY A DOUBLE MOVE: that the history of memory be more
rigorous theoretically in articulating the relationship between the social, the
political, and the cultural and, at the same time, more anarchical and comprehensive
in using the term memory as an explanatory device that links representation
and social experience. I have attempted to argue, via the discussion of memory
studies, that mine is really a critique of cultural history. A critique of two kinds.
There exists in memory studies the danger of reducing culture to politics and
ideology, instead of broadening the field from the political to the social and the
experiential, to an everyday history of memory. And there exists the danger of
reducing culture to some vague notion of memory, whereby memory is separated
from other memories in society and from the culture around it. That a given
memory exists, that it has a symbolic representation and a political significance is
obvious, but in itself it explains little if we do not place this memory within a global
network of social transmission and symbolic representations.
Several of my arguments, I am certain, are familiar to some. There is nothing new
in pointing out the importance of a history of reception for our understanding of a
cultural artifact. And this, indeed, emerges as a lesson we can draw from this essay:
with regard to certain renditions of memory and cultural history, these arguments
still need to be made. Certain kinds of cultural history seem to forget bodies of
knowledge that one would think had already been internalized, thanks to classic
social history.
45Bodnar, Remaking America, 253.
46 In fact, Bodnar does use the metaphor of the whole and its parts to explain his views on the
relationship of memories. Vernacular culture represents a variety of interests that "are grounded in
parts of the whole," namely the nation-state. But for Bodnar, "the component parts of the nation-state
[are] its families, classes, ethnic groups, and regions [which] attracts loyalty and devotion." The
nation-state thus remains an aggregation of sanctified vernacular memories, while official memory
remains extraneous to it, a metaphor of" 'unitary conceptual framework."' Bodnar, RemakingAmerica,
14, 16.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1997
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Collective Memory and Cultural History 1403
There are many ways of doing memory, and while my critique raises some
problems in current approaches, it simultaneously emphasizes the open-endedness
of the notiop. The beauty of memory is that it is imprecise enough to be
appropriated by unexpected hands, to connect apparently unrelated topics, to
explain anew old problems. Among the many roads open for scholars, one, I
believe, is especially fruitful in the current state of the field: to write the history of
memory. We have to distinguish between memory as a heuristic device and memory
as part of the mental equipment of a society, of an age. It is not always clear
whether "memory" is used as an imposed methodological tool to analyze how a
given society constructed a past (similar to using "class" to understand seventeenthcentury
Europe) or whether "memory" was indeed a contemporary metaphor to
understand the past (like class in twentieth-century Europe). Thus the memory, say,
of World War II in a given society cannot be separated from the development after
1945 of the term "memory" itself into a leading concept used by people to
understand the past, private and public, personal and national. For if the study of
memory focuses creatively on how people construct a past through a process of
appropriation and contestation, is the real problem not, perhaps, that people
construct the past by using the term "memory" at all?
To write a history of memory, we need to draw the mental horizon of an age.
When and why did memory become a habit of mind shared by people to give
meaning to the past? One can imagine that it is the kind of historical problem
Warburg and Bloch would have been delighted to pose, and perhaps to begin to
answer. And so, perhaps the first task of the history of memory is to historicize
memory.
Alon Confino is an assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia,
where he teaches modern German and European history. He earned his PhD
at the University of California at Berkeley. His book, The Nation as a Local
Metaphor: Wurttemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918,
was published this fall. Confino has published on nationalism, memory, film,
and consumer culture. This article emerged from his interest in the methods
and theories of history writing, especially social and cultural history. He is now
at work on a project about the nexus between tourism, consumer culture, and
national identity in twentieth-century Germany, exploring how the past turned
into a commodity for mass consumption and how consumer culture shapes
modern perceptions of the past.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1997
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