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History as Public and Private Memory
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Jay WinterEmmanuel Sivan |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
That history is said to be full of surprises is due not least of all to the fact that events that one person remembers may not coincide with what another equally qualified witness remembers to be the case. What people as a society remember--and indeed what a society may prefer to forget--can have implications that reach into all areas of human existence. This is especially true of the experience of war, where the memories of individual soldiers may not tally with the official account of events. Jay Winter, of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and Emmanel Sivan, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, ask whether historians can benefit from the psychological study of human memory. |
 ollective remembrance is public recollection. It is the act of gathering bits and pieces of the past, and joining them together in public. The 'public' is the group that produces, expresses, and consumes it. What they create is not a cluster of individual memories; the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Collective memory is constructed through the action of groups and individuals in the light of day. Passive memory--understood as the personal recollections of a silent individual--is not collective memory, though the way we talk about our own memories is socially bounded. |
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| 'Lest we forget'. The poppy is widely used as commemorative of those who have fallen in battle. | |
When people enter the public domain, and comment about the past--their own personal past, their family past, their national past, and so on--they bring with them images and gestures derived from their broader social experience. As Maurice Halbwachs put it, their memory is 'socially framed' (M. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 1992). When people come together to remember, they enter a domain beyond that of individual memory. |
The upheavals of this century have tended to separate individual memories from politically and socially sanctioned official versions of the past. All political leaders massage the past for their own benefit, but over the last ninety years many of those in power have done more: they have massacred it. Milan Kundera tells the story of a photograph of the political leadership of the Czech socialist republic in 1948 (M. Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1980, p. 3). One man in the photo was later purged. That individual had been removed from the photograph; all that remained was his hat, in the hands of a surviving colleague. The snapshot--an image of a past event--had been reconfigured; those who 'remembered' that the hat had once had a man under it, had to think again. |
Collective memory
In many other ways, private and public modes of remembering were severed in the Soviet period. The lies and distortions were terribly visible. To be sure, there were counter-trends. In some authoritarian societies, popular theatre and ceremony played a critical role, especially in bringing women's voices into the chorus of public comment on the past. Because memory can be gendered, women's testimony arises in different places than that of men. But this distinction should not be drawn too sharply. The poetry that Nadezdha Mandelstam memorized, written by her husband Osip Mandelstam, was their joint and precious possession (N. Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, 1974). She stayed alive, she said, to ensure that his voice was not silenced. Others were not so fortunate. |
The circulation of fiction was similarly significant in the dark days of dictatorship. Literature played a critical role in keeping collective memory alive in a society where the writing of history was a routine operation dedicated to the glorification of the regime. Not only history, but the names of towns, roads, and the like became mythologized. New toponyms, inspired by the Russian revolution, tended to abolish all diversity, whether regional or cultural. They homogenized the country, shaping it all in the image of the all-powerful centre. In a word, ideology replaced memory by imposing the imaginary notion of a uniform Soviet people. Literature taught otherwise. |
Under Fascism or other repressive regimes, the invasion of everyday private life by political agents contaminated memories of mundane events; how to write about family life under such circumstances was a profound challenge. Where 'normality' ended and the monstrous began is a question which may never be answered fully. A similar divide between recollections of the rhythms of daily life under the Nazis--private memories--and 'amnesia' about the disappearance of the Jews has spawned a huge interpretive literature. As Saul Friedlander has observed, 'the Nazi past is too massive to be forgotten, and too repellent to be integrated into the 'normal' narrative of memory' (S. Friedlander, Memory, History and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe, 1993, p. 2). This dilemma has been the subject of entire libraries; it has also informed painting, sculpture, architecture, and other facets of the visual arts. |
It would be idle to assume that these problems are restricted to authoritarian regimes. Even the democratic West has had trouble in reconciling its official versions of the past with the memories of millions of ordinary people. This is especially true in the case of that other collective trauma of the twentieth century, that of the two world wars. Of course, the two histories--that of Fascism and communism on the one hand, and of warfare on the other--are inextricably mixed (see E. J. Hobsbawn, The Age of Extremes, 1994, p. 4). The shape of 'the short twentieth century' emerged from the catastrophe of the First World War. It is only now in the 1990s, after the collapse of communism, and at a time when the European state system created in 1919 is being reconfigured, that we are able to see clearly some of the fundamental features of this brutal century. |
Memory and history
Historians have contributed to public conversations about the recent past. They have helped to organize exhibitions, create museums, and write both for their colleagues and students, as well as for a wider public. But it is important to separate any notion of 'collective memory' from historical knowledge. Collective memory is not what historians say about the past. These professionals try to provide a documentary record of events, but in doing so they almost always depart from private memories. Anyone who has conducted interviews with participants in public events can attest to that. Collective memory is not historical memory, though the two usually overlap at many points. Professional history matters, to be sure, but only to a small population. Collective remembrance is a set of acts which go beyond the limits of the professionals. These acts may draw from professional history, but they do not depend on it. |
This is apparent in the uproar that greets some public exhibitions, presenting a narrative which varies from individual recollection, from the official version of events, or offends some particular sensibilities. Collective remembrance is apparently too important a subject to be left to the historians. |
This is evident in the way wars have been remembered in public. In all combatant countries there has been a proliferation of monuments, understood as literary, visual, or physical reminders of twentieth-century warfare. Many are self-serving tributes; most go beyond state-sponsored triumphalism to the familial and existential levels where many of the effects of war on the lives of ordinary people reside. |
Homo psychologicus
The difficult terrain between individual memories and collective remembrance may be traversed more safely in the light of the findings of two very different communities of scholars. The first studies cognitive psychology; the second, social psychology and patterns of action. Each has much to add to our understanding of remembrance as a social activity. |
Many historians use the term 'memory' as if it were unproblematic. But here both scientific and historical disputes abound. Decades of empirical research in cognitive psychology have unearthed sets of terms and pathways which have a direct bearing on the nature of individual memory. And since collective remembrance is an activity of individuals coming together in public to recall the past, historians would do well to reflect on the findings of cognitive psychologists on how memory happens. |
These findings are much too complex and varied to be discussed in detail. All we can do here is to provide a stylized and schematic summary of the major lines of interpretation in this vast and growing field. When relevant, we highlight terms in the scientific literature which have a bearing on the historical problem we address below. |
<I>Social learning</I>
Cognitive psychologists use the term social learning. It is a process to be distinguished from declarative learning, or learning facts about nature (which plant is poison ivy) or the human environment (how to tell the time). Declarative learning is storing away bits of information, such as how many centimetres are in an inch, or when the Battle of Hastings took place. Social learning, in contrast, is the assimilation by an individual of narratives or scripts about himself and his exchanges with other people. Given the slow pace of child development, and the care needed at an early age, it is a commonplace to say that we are never the first people to know who we are. |
It should be evident why a student of 'social learning' cannot ignore the findings of cognitive psychologists. It is true that their experiments are unavoidably partial and 'unreal', in the sense of being unable to show the overlap and interaction of individuals and groups. But they force us to return to the individual, whose sense of the past is both the beginning and the end of all processes of 'social learning'. |
<I>Memory traces</I>
The process of recollection has a biochemical and a neurological dimension, both of which are still the subject of elementary research. Despite the sheer complexity of these processes, a number of rudimentary findings may be identified. |
The first is the notion of a memory trace. Most experiences leave long-term memory traces, recorded in our episodic memory system--the system which encodes 'what happened', that is, events. It is to be distinguished from systems which record not 'what' but 'that'--mundane, matter-of-fact events or details about nature or human affairs, grouped under the rubric of semantic memory. Long-term memory is defined as the retention for more than one minute of either kind of information. All these traces differ, though, in their density. |
They also differ in accessibility for recognition or for recall. The density (or weight of a memory) is shaped to a large extent by the dramatic nature of the experience, its uniqueness, its being reconsidered or reinterpreted after the fact as a turning point. Density is further enhanced by the emotional nature of the experience (quite often dramatic) and its autobiographical nature. Autobiographical memory appears to be the most enduring kind of memory. For example, combat experience is particularly dense because it is personal and dramatic. Harrowing moments are denser still. |
<I>Interference, recognition and recall</I>
There is no convincing evidence so far of the physical decay or disappearance of long-term memory traces. They seem to be deposited in the brain in an archeological manner; that is, they are there, even though other traces are on top of them. |
Longitudinal studies have found these traces surviving over six decades. But some are not immediately available for retrieval. Why? Because other memory traces create 'layers' deposited on top of the original one, impeding its direct and immediate recall. |
Psychologists refer to this obscuring or eclipsing of a memory trace by the terms retroactive or proactive interference. An instance of 'retroactive interference' is when newly encoded memory traces reshape, cover, or eclipse older memory traces. Proactive interference occurs when early memories shape our sense of the context or relative importance of later experiences. |
The nature of interference is not the same with all memory traces. Here psychologists operate a distinction between 'recognition' and 'recall'. Recognition is an association, an identification of an issue; recall is its evaluation, requiring more active effort. Students may recognize the name 'John Milton', but only some recall the character and significance of Paradise Lost. For our purposes, the distinction is important, because recognition of memory traces may survive interference, even when recall doesn't. This is hardly surprising, since the amount of information stored up for purposes of recognition is much less than that needed for recall. |
<I>Distortion, reinterpretation, interpolation</I>
Evidence produced so far supports the view that the distortion of memory traces does not usually happen after the initial encoding/reconstruction of the experience in the memory trace. Distortion precedes encoding. |
Another way of putting this point is to note that a memory trace is not an exact replica of an experience, even under the best of circumstances. Memory traces have a telescoping/selective nature. That is, a number of events or personalities are contracted into one, or some aspects of an experience are ordered and highlighted. In effect, some reinterpretation has already been made at this initial stage. It may be done through schemata or scripts which are either personal ('this is the story of my life'; or 'I'm always missing opportunities') or borrowed from the culture or sub-culture of which the individual is a member ('it's hard to be a Jew'). |
Here we come to an area very familiar to historians. Memory traces may be interfered with even after encoding, by a process of manipulation, or interpolated learning. Outside influences can persuade us of the truth of certain notions or the reality of certain events, by advertising, brain-washing, or propaganda. |
The distortion and selection of visual memories is easier than in the case of verbal ones. But in both, interference operates either by manipulating major so-called 'facts' and/or by introducing key interpretive terms which have clear-cut resonances for the semantic memory of the individual and are, of course, culture-dependent. The result is a new script which integrates pieces of information brought to bear upon the interpretation of the event. As we all know, such new scripts may vary dramatically from the original memory, let alone the event itself. |
<I>Rehearsal</I>
Later access or recall of memories is greatly enhanced by the retelling of these narratives, either by individuals alone or in public. Conversation is a fundamental social act; hence the importance for the memory of war of the oral testimony of survivors. Rehearsal is done by the individual not by the society, through story-telling or meditation, though individuals reinforce their personal rehearsals in social events or rituals. Such rituals provide cues which are essential for triggering the process of recall/retrieval. While individuals may have their own cues, ritual provides them with social cues--moments of silence, saluting the flag, and so on. |
Some events are sufficiently powerful to be recalled initially without rehearsal. An earthquake is a good case in point. One hit San Francisco in 1994. Virtually everybody in the Bay Area had a recollection of the tremor, and held it passively for a time. This is indeed an exceptional case, in which a 'passive' collective memory exists, unfiltered through anyone's active attempt to make people remember it. What made it more than purely individual was that the media and word of mouth quickly made it just what each resident experienced at the moment of the jolt. Here the exception to the rule that collective memory is not passive memory is accounted for by the fact that the memory trace was so powerful that no rehearsal was needed initially to recall it. Sooner or later, though, these passive memories become formulaic--chants, such as 'where was I when John Kennedy was shot'--or fade away. Then recall requires rehearsal in public. |
In the retelling of memories, certain elements of the story are highlighted. Psychologists refer to these facets as primacy effects, which enhance recollection. Salient events are more vividly remembered and recalled, especially when they are associated with a specific time and place. This is what is meant by the term 'context dependency'. Context dependency may be extrinsic or intrinsic. On the one hand, memory traces may be associated with certain external or 'extrinsic' features originating outside the individual: smell, colour, sounds. Such memories, on the other hand, may be linked powerfully with 'intrinsic' aspects of our mood or personal situation at the time the memory trace was encoded. A beautiful place may be recalled because of the elation or depression the visitor brought to it: that is an example of 'intrinsic' context dependency. The evocation of a whole world triggered by a French pastry--Proust's madeleine--is an instance of 'extrinsic' context dependency. |
Experiments have shown that 'extrinsic contexts' affect recall but not recognition. That is, if a student takes an examination requiring recall rather than simple recognition--interpreting Paradise Lost rather than knowing the name 'John Milton'--her grade is likely to be improved if the examination occurs in the room where the class initially studied the text. But when the test is a simple quiz, a test of recognition, no such positive enhancement of performance occurs through the location of the test. This finding may help to explain the importance of ritual in social learning, since rituals help to produce 'extrinsic contexts' which enhance the recall of memories at given moments and places. |
<I>Trauma</I>
The encoding and revision of scripts are usually voluntary or deliberate acts; we learn through story-telling and its echoes in our own lives. But some events are harder to introduce into a script than others. There is a threshold of density of experience; when passed, that experience is usually referred to as a trauma or traumatic. |
There are many different usages of this term, but for our purposes it is possibly best to consider the term simply as connoting a serious and enduring shock. Trauma, in this sense, is identified as latent or delayed memory, and is especially marked by its sudden recurrence whatever the individual's will to recall may be. A 'traumatic memory' may be triggered by extrinsic contexts, that is, similarities of ambience, noise, smell, mood. For instance, an individual walking through an American city during a particularly steamy summer may feel the anxiety of jungle combat, though it is only the heat and humidity which the two contexts share. What triggers the memory is the traumatic nature of the encoded experience. Under specific conditions, and occasionally long after the initial set of 'traumatic events', these extrinsic contexts can produce overwhelming recall. At this point the memory crowds out everything else; it is potentially paralytic. |
The work of cognitive psychologists here reinforces the findings of psychiatrists and neurologists, who have identified biochemical pathways of 'trauma'. But, for our purposes, the key element of this analysis is that 'traumatic' memories are not a separate category of remembrance, but simply an extreme phenomenon of processes of recollection we all share. |
Implications for the historical study of memory
The study of how individuals remember is hard enough. Historians want to go one step further and study how groups of individuals remember together. It is evident that we need all the help we can get. For this reason, let us consider the implications of this body of cognitive psychological research for the history of 'collective memory'. |
<I>Social learning</I>
Societies do not learn. Individuals in societies learn, but their learning has sufficient overlap for us to be able to speak metaphorically of social learning. It follows that for two or more individuals to hold the same memory, even if they have experienced the same event, means only that there is sufficient overlap between their memory traces. For this overlap to become a social phenomenon, it must be expressed and shared. In this sense, and in this sense alone, can one speak, again metaphorically, of 'collective memory'. |
<I>Shelf-life</I>
Collective memory has no existence independent of the individual, and in consequence, 'collective memory' has a shelf-life, after which individuals cease to share and express it. Memory artefacts are produced by external rehearsal, but they are just that, memory aids. As long as there are individuals using these aids, whether internally or externally in order to rehearse their memories, then the process of remembrance is alive. It may die out or it may be given a new lease on life; at that point, the 'shelf-life' is renewed, but not forever. One example is the way an Israeli monument created by bereaved parents was adopted thirty years later by a municipality which wanted to create a locus for civic pride. The 'shelf-life' of the monument was renewed thereby, but over time this usage will fade away too. |
<I>Ritual and rehearsal</I>
Latent (and even implicit, fleeting, or overlapping) memories become active ('flash-bulbs lighting up') in specific times and places. Time is especially connected with 'ritual', which is a series of stylized and repetitive actions. Spatial memory--which is to be distinguished from visual memory--is the transformation of latent into active memory when an individual occupies a site associated with an event or a ritual. After the passing of these encounters in a particular place and at these particular moments of social action, most individuals depart and store the experience as individual memory. Then collective memory ceases, though it can be revived through a return to the initial framework of action. |
<I>Agency, 'brain-washing', and manipulation</I>
Much attention has been paid to manipulation/reinterpretation of memory by elites, particularly political/cultural ones, whether at the moment of the events, or much later. It is important, though, to note that much 'memory work' goes on spontaneously within civil society, especially after salient or dramatic events. This work goes on through exchanges among members of social networks, either those pre-existing the events or created as a result of them. Agency in the constitution of social learning about the past is crucial, but it operates from below, not only from above. |
War and remembrance
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| The Bayeux Memorial, commemorates soldiers of the British Commonwealth who died in Normandy and have no known grave. | |
So far we have considered the implications of this area of research for the study of historical remembrance in general. But the test of interdisciplinary work is in the concrete results of research in one field, informed by the insights of another. Our focus is on a particular problem in a particular time and place: twentieth-century warfare in Europe, North America, and the Middle East. Here it is evident that there is much of value to be derived from the work of colleagues working in allied disciplines. Let us consider a number of these implications, in the terminology described above. |
Warfare is no doubt a time of dramatic, unique experiences, which leave dense memory traces, individual and social. This is particularly true in the twentieth century, with mass industrial warfare of conscript armies. Obviously, because this is contemporary history, many living witnesses are still around after each and every war and make a particular contribution to social learning about the past. Hypotheses about agency can thus be tested with greater accuracy and variety due to the presence of these living witnesses. |
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| 'Their Name Liveth Forever': united in death, individually each man was irrelevant to the outcome of the war he fought. | |
These witnesses may be defined as agents, whether surviving soldiers, members of families of those killed or wounded, surviving civil victims or their relatives, and even people peripherally affected by the war far from the front lines. Those people are involved in memory work, that is, public rehearsal of memories, quite often not in order to create social scripts or schemata for the interpretation of the war. They act in order to struggle with grief, to fill in the silence, to offer something symbolically to the dead, for political reasons. In most of their immediate concerns, they tend to fail. The dead are forgotten; peace does not last; memorials fade into the landscape. It is a moot question, at the very least, as to whether healing at the personal level follows. |
This intense activity, in family, survivor, or other networks, rehearses the memory traces in the case of the agents involved and also transmits information and scripts about the war to other contemporaries, and beyond them, to generations born after the war. The scripts are based upon autobiographical memory, depict dramatic events, are ritualized in ceremonies, and thus impart many elements of social learning. |
Other agents join in. Their activity has other objectives (profit or other gain, artistic expression), but their efforts overlap with the work of survivor networks. The difference, though, is that audiences (of a television series, a play, a book) cannot really be considered a network; it is extremely difficult to judge the variegated reactions of these consumers. The advantage of survivor networks is that their 'social learning' may be passed on to later generations. These younger people, uninitiated into the actual experience, carry emotion-laden stories very effectively. For some, carrying a survivor's narrative can approximate survivorship itself. |
We must be reticent, though, before concluding that most wartime experience is remembered socially in this way. Much is forgotten, and necessarily so. The dialectic between the need to remember and the need to forget and to go on to a less harrowing phase of life has been and remains an ongoing one. |
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