Abstract
Aleida Assmann and Linda Shortt (eds), Memory and Political Change. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 248pp. ISBN 9780230302006
The volume Memory and Political Change, edited by two well-known specialists in the field of memory studies, Aleida Assmann and Linda Shortt, comprises various studies concerning the relation between memory and politics, written from a multidisciplinary perspective. Memory is an interdisciplinary and an umbrella concept (Erll, 2011) that reunites different cultural and social aspects. Any approach of memory as a concept needs to be interdisciplinary, responding to the need of assuring different correlations between various disciplines: literature, history, sociology, philosophy, psychology, arts, politics, etc., and also offering an applicative frame to the theoretical concepts presented. Having as a guiding hypothesis the idea that memory is not only dynamic but also an important agent of change, the studies within this volume strive for new perspectives and directions for future research.
In their introduction the editors relate memory to ‘transition’, defined as transformation from one political state to another, and also with a new narrative of the past, which involves modification at the level of political and social identity. Assuming as a subject of analysis the role played by the act of remembering and forgetting in the transition process, the editors outline three methodological premises: the plasticity of memory; the representations of past events as recreation of the past in the present; and the coexistence of heterogeneous memories (pp. 3–4). These premises are correlated with some general factors of transition: time, trauma, changes at the level of political regime, social frame, generational and media events.
The volume is structured in four parts, presenting the individual perspective at the level of transgenerational transmission and over political transformation, outlining the political strategies adopted at the collective level, the modalities of transposing the past at the fictional level, and problems raised by memory when it becomes an impediment to change. What I consider to be of great importance is the relation between memory and identity, assuming the fact that identity is defined not only by elements from the collective memory level (Halbwachs, 1925),but also by those passed into the oblivion dimensions (Weinrich, 1999). I will use the relation memory – identity – as a frame for the review of this volume. My proposition is that understanding the past in a holistic way implies an understanding of identity and various analyses of the transformations taking place at this level. Identity is a recurrent theme in this volume. In one form or another it is always present: the identity of the German people after the Second World War; the identity of the Jews who survived the Holocaust, or of those who bear the burden of Holocaust memories even if they weren't directly involved; the identity of a nation that suffered an internal split (the Rwanda case); or the role of reconciliation in creating a common identity, as in the case of the Australian people, and the strategies used in order to maintain a coherent identity, and so on.
Discussing ‘replacement children’ and the trans-generational transmission of trauma in the cases of Jewish couples who lost a child in the Holocaust and chose to have another one as a ‘substitute’, Gabriele Schwab reveals not only a form of pseudo-identity adopted by these children but also a ‘culture's changing relationship to loss, death, mortality and mourning’ (p. 21). Correlating this study with the final one in the book dedicated to the memory specificity across cultures, one can assume that after World War II and the Holocaust trauma the collective identity suffered transformations of the political and social narratives adopted at the public level. These transformations indicate not only a new revalorization of the past, but also a process of reshaping the collective identity, materialized in different ways of integrating the past in a coherent narrative, but maintaining the duty to remember the past (Margalit, 2002).
As an important area of research in memory studies, the situation of Germany after World War II is analysed not only from a social-psychological point of view following the transformations over four generations in general frames of externalization, moralization and institutionalization, but also from the perspective of the ‘culture of remembrance’. From the latter point of view, the dilemma is to consider the memory as panacea, or as poison that keeps ‘the destructive energies alive for the historical actors’ (p. 53). In her study, Aleida Assmanin shows that the dichotomy remembering–forgetting must lose its rigidity and that a new cultural framework implies new meanings and connotations for remembering and forgetting. Many of the studies included in this volume indicate once more different strategies used not only to institutionalize memory but also to manipulate it in order to create a coherent national narrative. An example in this direction is offered by James V Wertsch on Russian national narrative templates.
The volume reviewed here has not only a strong theoretical structure but presents and develops interesting and useful distinctions, which are necessary in a field governed not only by an interdisciplinary approach but also by a great variety of research and developments. Thus I consider that the distinctions made between social amnesia, chosen amnesia and chosen trauma, and between specific narratives and narrative templates, are distinctions sustained by social and cultural reality. These offer a necessary theoretical stability in the field of memory studies. The dynamics of remembering and forgetting, the implications of this dynamicity at the political level, the acceptance of responsibility for the past at private or public level, the necessity to find the truth regarding the past and to offer in this way a sense of closure – to ‘reinstate’ the dead in the social, familial, and national memory (p. 65) – all these aspects recommend this volume to the specialist in the field and to anyone interested in memory studies and in the way in which one can perform the past (Tilmans et al., 2010).