Frames

of
Remembrance
 Frames
of
Remembrance
Iwona
Irwin-
Zarecka

~~ ~~o~J~~~~;up
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 1994 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge

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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 93-8802

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona.
Frames of remembrance.: the dynamics of collective memory / Iwona Irwin-
Zarecka.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-56000-138-0 $32.95
1. Memory—Social aspects. 2. History—Psychological aspects. I. Title.

BF378.S65I78 1993
153.1'2-dc20 93-8802

ISBN-13: 978-1-4128-0683-1 (pbk)

To Mama
 Contents

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Part I: The Inquiry
1. Setting the Analytical Parameters 3
2. Ultimate Challenge 23
Part U: Dynamics of Relevance
3. Communities of Memory 47
4. Conflicts 67
5. Presence of the Past 87
6. Memory in Future Tense 101

Part III: Dynamics of Memory Work

7. Absences 115
8. Memory Projects 133
9. Truth Claims 145
10. Instant Memory 161
11. Intermediaries 175
Select Annotated Bibliography 193
Index 207
 Preface

"June 12, 1992. Another long talk into the night about Poland's current
predicaments. One more government fell, this time amidst vicious
rumors and accusations ignited by a new law that would make all public
officials open to charges of collaborating with the Communist regime.
Mom is flying back to Warsaw the day after tomorrow, fearful of what
this last round of battle has done to the already ugly climate on the streets.
Her stories help me to fill in the emotional detail behind the often dry
words of printed debates. Just how is one to defme what "collaboration"
should mean in a country that after all had functioned rather normally for
the forty-five years of the Communist rule?

August 12, 1992. It is cold and rainy again; this holiday has been really
good for reading. Took along the two thick volumes from the Smith-
sonian; in both Exhibiting Cultures and Museums and Communities, I
hear many echoes of my own troubled accommodation to the "last Jews
of Poland" put on photographic display back in 1986. Rationally, I have
to accept being a remnant of a once vibrant culture, but this does not take
away the unease I feel at servirig as a specimen, prepared by and for
non-Jews. But then, at the time, it could be argued that for Poles actually
to see that "real Jews" still lived in the country was beneficial in itself.
Should my Native Canadian student be equally relieved at the sight of
tribal artifacts in our university library?
Another set of echoes, these in the now daily newspaper reports about
the carnage in Yugoslavia. "Cattle trains," "Dachau," "officially uncon-
firmed" ... Israel issues a statement, appealing to Jews worldwide to
forget who were the victims and the perpetrators in the Balkans of the
1940s, and to remember what they learned about the complicity in
atrocities; this breaks a long silence about the situation. Could the Serbs
themselves be made to forget?

October 12, 1992. An interesting conference in Philadelphia. On

Sunday, the city hosts America's largest Columbus Day parade. My
seven-year-old son and his Dad readily agree to this bit of "data collec-
tion." Watchers are sparse, but the parade does take nearly four hours to
ix
x Frames of Remembrance

move through. There are many Italian community groups, Luciano

Pavarotti as a grand master, lots of music, plus historically costumed
marchers. Columbus is there, of course, so are (twice) the Spanish royals,
and then, the colonials. Among the different characters from the past, a
lonely girl, dressed in what to me resembles a Halloween get-up, walks
as an Indian. The theme being "500 years of transportation, exploration
and travel," we see monocycles, old-fashioned cars and wagons, and
next, a big contingent of bikers, at their familial best. The parade ends
with a very long string of military vehicles, including two tanks playfully
rotating together. Was not the New York Times proclaiming this morning
that Americans are rethinking their history? My analytical self is sharply
reminded of the distance from the ground ... or is it my Canadian self that
looks in amazement at a celebration so totally impossible this year
anywhere up North?"
As I think back, most of the ideas I have worked with when question-
ing societies' engagement with the past came from just such a diverse
storehouse of mental notes, notes taken over a period of now close to ten
years, beginning with my first forays as a graduate student into the
historical gaps and silences. In the essays that comprise this book, the
reader will be occasionally made proxy to the process; much of the time,
though, it is only the end product that is being shared. To trace the exact
itineraries of my reflecting on the dynamics of collective memory might,
in any event, prove impossible. What is possible, and what I would like
to do here as a way of introducing Frames of Remembrance, is to
reconstruct the key concerns orienting this inquiry.
First, the practical ones. As I set out to write, I kept thinking about my
own predicaments as a doctoral student in the early 1980s, embarking on
a project that I could not well define and realizing quite late that I was
indeed studying the dynamics of collective memory. I wanted this book
to be of some help to others facing the challenge of working in a field
that does not properly belong to any one discipline, yet one in which
(now) a great deal of empirical research as well as theorizing is actually
getting done. And I felt that the best way to accomplish this would be to
take on a small set of analytical problems and delve into them as areas
for investigation, with all the conceptual toolmaking this would imply.
The essays here were thus made to function as relatively self-contained
units, as diverse "entry points" defined by questions rather than the lines
separating disciplines or empirical territories.
 Preface xi

The strategy, I believe, worked. But it also produced a greater need

for explaining why it should. Thus the opening chapter of the book,
"Setting the Analytical Parameters," is the place to start, while all the
others invite the reader to sample according to individual interests.
The impetus for writing was thus rather pragmatic; I wished for the
book to offer ideas that could be worked with. And this very much
reflected the central question I worked with-how can we better under-
stand the dynamics of collective memory? The question, once examined,
led in a number of directions with three broad themes soon emerging,
themes that would run through all of the essays, each with different
emphases.
First, there was my concern with the role experience itself plays in the
subsequent construction of memories, both individual and collective.
Critical of analytical strategies that treat discourse about the past as
totally disconnected from that past, I was aiming to inject it back. Second,
I was interested in shifting the attention away from purely textual
"readings" of the contents of collective memory, interested in questions
about cultural sensibilities and norms that inform both the structure and
the texture of remembrance. Here, the goal was to move beyond the
predominantly political interpretations of the uses of the past. The third
theme, or agenda, was the integration of heuristically separate domains,
all the while accounting for their differences. A better understanding of
the dynamics of collective memory could only emerge, I was consistently
to argue, once we develop customized tools for studying museums
alongside Disney's theme parks, history books alongside novels,
television movies alongside monuments. At issue here is also the for-
mulation of critical standards that would take into account the diversity
of our engagements with the past, intellectually, emotionally, morally.
Just how difficult this last task may be is the focus of chapter 2,
"Ultimate Challenge." I have placed it next to the broad outline of the
inquiry to serve as a modesty-producing reminder of our limitations. For
readers who prefer a more optimistic stance while on the analytical job,
this chapter may best be encountered as the conclusion.
While inviting individualized sequencing of the book, I have grouped
the remaining essays into two "problem clusters." Part II consists of
reflections on how the past comes to be relevant to people, in smaller as
well as larger communities. The discussion here centers around the roles
that a past can play, is made to play, does play.
xii Frames of Remembrance

In Part III, the emphasis shifts to a closer look at how this is actually
done. Now, the focus is on memory work itself, on the practices and the
practitioners. It is here that questions are raised about the construction of
meaning at its most basic. Included in Part III is an essay on "Absences"
that deserves a separate mention. As much as it addresses the work that
produces social forgetting, it belongs with those dealing with the more
tangible accomplishments. But it is also closely paralleling themes in Part
I, problematizing the analytical strategy itself.
At the end of the book, the reader will find a select, critically annotated
bibl~ography-this too reflects my overall objective of proffering useful
research tools. As the range of works listed suggests perhaps better than
any argument, the study of the dynamics of collective memory is rapidly
gaining momentum. I hope that these reflections contribute further to its
becoming an analytical field of its own.
 Acknowledgments

I have been very fortunate when writing this book. The support and
encouragement I received made all the difference. For this has been a
special challenge, to reflect on the dynamics of collective memory when
the topic, rather suddenly, moves into the spotlight. Not only have the
world events supplied more than ample material here, academic studies
poured out as well. Gratifying developments, both, yet intellectually
daunting nevertheless. That I was able to stay on course, I owe to many.
First, I would like to thank Irving Louis Horowitz for having con~
fidence in this project from its inception, and Mary Curtis for her always
helpful advice. One cannot ask for more supportive publishers.
I am also very grateful to my home institution, Wilfrid Laurier
University, for both the financial assistance with research and writing as
well as the less tangible, but no less important, rewarding of my en-
deavors. The editorial work by Kathryn Wardropper and the invaluable
technical help from Dorothy Lim made preparing this manuscript a great
deal easier.
Some mentors are simply happy to see their charges graduate; mine
are different. For comments and suggestions on several parts of the draft,
I thank Bennett M. Berger, loan Davies, Kurt Jonassohn, and Michael
Schudson. For my frequent stubbornness, I apologize.
Recent conferences on social theory, politics and the arts served as
especially hospitable forums for trying out my ideas; I would like to thank
Judith Balfe, Jeffrey Shandler, and Suzanne Vromen in particular for their
input. As the most valuable of follow-ups, I very much appreciated Vera
L. Zolberg's close readings of many of the chapters.
When nearing completion, the text underwent a critique from some-
what more unusual quarters; I thank Paul Viminitz, an analytic
philosopher, for his insightful comments.
In the course of writing, I also received helpful comments on specific
chapters from Alan L. Berger, Terry Copp, Modris Eksteins, Ron Grimes,
H. David Kirk, Bruce Lincoln, Richard D. Madsen, and Robert Payne.
Here, I need to extend a special thanks to Alice L. Eckardt, not only for
her detailed reading of "Ultimate Challenge" but also for the many years
of encouragement.
xiii
xiv Frames of Remembrance

It is with deep sadness that I extend another special thanks to a friend;

Maria Elster, who died last year, a Holocaust survivor and a historian,
had been a source of both inspiration and much practical assistance since
we met in Paris in 1983. I miss her.
Finally, a note of appreciation to my family. Without the emotional
sustenance from my husband, Hugh Smyth, and our son Joshua, this book
simply could not have been written. I owe the most, though, to my mother,
Jadwiga Irwin-Zarecka, who lives in Warsaw. For over ten years now,
she has worked hard to make my work possible, searching for books,
clipping out articles, and generally acting as an excellent research assis-
tant would. Deserving recognition for my first book, she had to forgo it;
it was better that way. Now that the Communist regime is gone, I can
finally repair the situation. This book is dedicated to her.
 PART I
The Inquiry
 1

Setting the Analytical Parameters

Why be interested in studying the dynamics of collective memory?

And, moreover, why insist that the subject matter define the terms of its
analysis, to the effect of virtually erasing interdisciplinary boundaries?
Let me begin with the second question; it is the easier one. For a person
of my generation-! was born in Poland in 1955-the world in which
we were growing up would have been quite incomprehensible without
reference to World War II and its aftermath. I could not directly remember
the war, of course. I learned about it in school, listened to stories told by
my parents and their friends, read books, watched movies and, later,
television programs, recited poems at various commemorative oc-
casions. Most of all, perhaps, as I walked through the streets of Warsaw,
a city rebuilt on the ruins, I would be surrounded by reminders of the
war-buildings with bullet holes still there, memorial plaques, the very
newness of the "Old Town." At first, as a child, I tended to see that past
in terms of high drama and adventure; even my Jewish father's accounts
of the fate of the family fitted the pattern-he and his sister both survived
by "passing" on the Aryan side. Later, the picture acquired a far more
sombre tone, and, as I was trying to understand my Jewish heritage, I
would rapidly become aware of the pieces that had been missing, missing
in my city, my books, and the lessons at school. Making sense of the past
became a struggle, not to be resolved until much later when I embarked
on an academic study of Polish-Jewish relations. By that time, I lived in
North America and my quest was very much a private endeavor. Had I
so chosen, I could have separated myself completely from memory of
the war. On the other hand, although there were no bullet holes in
buildings around me, the libraries were of help. I gathered the missing
pieces.

3
4 Frames of Remembrance

My relationship with "collective memory" may be an especially close

one, partly of necessity, partly by choice. But it is not unique, in that we
all make sense of the past with the help of a whole variety of resources,
that this making sense is motivated by our personal experience but
facilitated (or impeded) by public offerings, and that such public offer-
ings are a mixture of presences and absences. A "collective memory" -as
a set of ideas, images, feelings about the past-is best located not in the
minds of individuals, but in the resources they share. 1 There is no reason
to privilege one form of resource over another-for example, to see
history books as important but popular movies as not. For some people,
in a given place, at a specific time-the East Germans in 1992-it is the
raw contents of the Stasi archives that inform, wound, stir debate. For
others, elsewhere-the American voters in the same year-the echoes of
Vietnam may still resound in political speeches and commentary. And it
is through an empirical investigation, rather than theoretical fiat, that we
assess which resources matter to whom. 2
It is also empirically that we need to establish the relationships
between publicly articulated and privately held views of the past; an
abundance of resources does not guarantee that people actually use them,
nor is persuasiveness of an account a predetermined constant. As we look
at a collective memory, at what it offers and at how its offeri~gs change,
we ought to remain modest in our claims. Individuals are perfectly
capable of ignoring even the best told stories, of injecting their own,
subversive meanings into even the most rhetorically accomplished
"texts" -and of attending to only those ways of making sense of the past
that fit their own.
Allowing for highly idiosyncratic reactions to what is publicly avail-
able does not mean that we abandon cultural analysis altogether. It means
that the analytical tools we use need to be capable of illuminating, if not
accounting for, the dialectic between public and private. The notion of
"framing" serves this purpose, I believe, very well. Generously borrowed
from Erving Goffman's approach to social situations as well as "texts,"3
questions about framing direct our attention to the powers inherent in
public articulation of collective memory to influence the private makings
of sense. Questions about framing are essentially about limits to the scope
of possible interpretations. Their aim is not to freeze one particular
"reading" as the correct one, rather, it is to establish the likely range of
meanings. Following Goffman, I too treat our interpretive practices as
 Setting the Analytical Parameters 5

patterned by the ways we define the situation at hand. And how we define
the situation at hand is largely, but not totally, dependent on socially
shared framing strategies and devices.
Framing can be an explicit procedure; to be on the safe side with
strangers, we often introduce a potentially problematic story with the "it's
a good joke" tag, for example. More often than not, though, framing
devices are more subtle, relying on our common sense of the world for
effectiveness. Newspaper editorials do not ordinarily restate the principle
that they are expressions of opinion, their special positioning within the
newspaper does that, on the assumption of the readers' tacit know ledge.
Framing cues can also be mixed and confusing. In a classroom situation,
when a male student comments on a female professor's "nice new
haircut," it is not clear what is going on. In Oliver Stone's film JFK, the
seamless combination of documentary footage with fictional accounts
works against the concluding description of the movie as a "search for
truth."
But what exactly do framing devices do? Rather than approach the
question in general terms, let us now focus on the realm of collective
memory. Frames that can be found here are put to a great variety of uses;
indeed, it is that elasticity of the concept that accounts for most of its
heuristic value.
First, there are frames that define the status of a particular "text," the
kind of reading it is to receive. History books presenting themselves as
"true accounts" to be incorporated into "basic knowledge" differ from a
television docudrama aiming to entertain and only secondarily to teach.
Considering the tremendous variety of symbolic means securing some
presence of the past, it is not surprising that the framing devices operating
at this level are also tremendously variable. Most, though, establish a
particular claim to historical truth together with a particular claim on our
attention. In some cases-commemoration ceremonies, for example-
we are being asked actively to remember. In other cases-a magazine
article about Columbus-we may be asked to reflect and to inform
ourselves. And if there are certain patterns to be observed here, related
to the differences among cultural forms themselves, there is also room
for surprises and contradictions. The already mentioned JFK, for ex-
ample, represents an unabashedly didactic exercise, rarely to be en-
countered in commercial cinema. The Vietnam War Memorial in New
York, covered with writings but made up mostly of glass, does not allow
6 Frames of Remembrance

for much contemplative reading. 4 Thus when inquiring into how different
"texts" work, we may be equipped with several general rules but still
need to attend to their individual qualities.
We also must attend to the qualities of the authorial voice itself. While
many of the frames here are genre-related, how a "text" functions can
rarely be separated from who produced it. Within a specific genre, such
as history books, the authority granted to individual authors varies;
differences in scholarly reputation, political perspective, sponsorship and
also the personal connection to the events being described may all come
into play.
The two commercial films, both made by Oliver Stone-JFK and
Born on the Fourth ofJuly-and both making strong claims to historical
truth, are actually very different. Stone served in Vietnam and he was an
observer, albeit a concerned one, of the Kennedy assassination aftermath.
A conservative in France may trust a story in Le Figaro, but not in the
Communist L 'Humanite. The factors responsible for these differences in
authority are context-specific; what matters to Canadians is not the same
as what matters to Cambodians. Once again, if there are some general
rules likely to apply-such as the importance of being a witness-there
is also the need for case-by-case specificity.
This principle-that while one can posit certain patterns of how
framing of the past operates, we must resort to empirical, context-sensi-
tive inquiries for a fuller understanding of the dynamics of collective
memory-informs this book as a whole. The analytical tools developed
here are exactly that, tools. They are to be used, and some have already
been used by others, and myself, to illuminate the subject at hand. When
it is possible to formulate a general proposition, such is always meant to
be tested against case studies, those now available and those still to be
done. In other words, what is being offered is a heuristic approach, a "way
of seeing" but especially a way of asking questions.
The preceding paragraph is in itself an example of framing, of course.
I am calling on you to read my book in a particular way, although I know
that some of you will not. I am also, rather deliberately, making my case
through the use of examples instead of theoretically sophisticated ration-
ales. This too is a framing device, in that it helps define the "ideal reader"
as someone who may come from any number of disciplinary back-
grounds or indeed be a novice in the field. Finally, my use of language,
favoring common usage terms even when proposing new concepts, also
 Setting the Analytical Parameters 7

contributes to framing this work as a tool-kit open to many. My own

intentions notwithstanding, how this book is read-if at all-very much
depends on the subsequent "editorial" input from other people. Critics,
reviewers, teachers, the reader's colleagues or friends, all may have a say
in the matter. And this too is an example of how framing works. The
process is not static, nor to be located solely with the "text" and its
"reader." A whole chain of intermediaries could be involved, opening for
multiple possibilities of reinterpretation. Collective memory is a terrain
especially prone to such overlaying of different frames, I would argue,
because it is filled with reused and reusable material. What is one day an
heirloom stored in your attic can tomorrow become a precious part of a
museum exhibit. American textbooks describing the history of the "evil
empire" are already becoming testimony to their age. And the novels
written by minority writers increasingly gain status as part of mainstream
heritage.
Some of these shifts in meaning are a result of deliberate effort and
much public discussion, others may be occurring more naturally within
complex social and cultural changes. Whatever the source, the ap-
pearance of new frames is an opportune moment for the analyst, as it
allows one better to expose the dynamics of collective memory. At issue
here, however, is a great deal more than our continuous "rewriting of
history." Just as any given "text" implicates certain claims to truth
together with demands on our attention, public discourse about the past
when seen as a whole does more than telling us what happened. Framing
devices employed at this meta-level, as it were, provide the structure to
both the contents of the past and the forms of remembrance. The debates
about the meaning of 1492, for example, introduced both the conflicting
versions of historical facts and figures as well as serious questions about
the propriety of commemoration itself. The fiftieth anniversary of the
attack on Pearl Harbor was an occasion to retell different stories, but also
to ponder the virtues of forgetting.
To understand how collective memory works, we cannot restrict our
inquiries to tracing the vicissitudes of historical knowledge or narratives.
We must also, and I believe foremost, attend to the construction of our
emotional and moral engagement with the past. When looking at public
discourse, this translates into questions about how the past is made to
matter. 5 Framing events, heroes, places as worthy of remembrance and
honor is quite different from defining whole historical chapters as a
8 Frames of Remembrance

burden to be mastered. Marketing European castles as a tourist attraction

is not the same as making it compulsory for schoolchildren to visit a local
museum. Speaking of the need to understand the legacy of the Com-
munist system in the name of success for economic and political reform
may be a lot more appealing and effective than evoking the moral
principles of punishing those responsible for its crimes.
Here, once again, some of the framing devices may be visible to all
while others require patient unearthing. Advocates of constructing the
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. were explicit6 about
Americans' obligation to this chapter of-now defined as universal-
history; a few years earlier, producers of the television drama Holocaust
implied something similar. But when looking at the fate of the same
memory during the preceding decade, we would need a whole combina-
tion of clues, from those found in textbooks to the responses to Holocaust
literature, in order to reconstruct the dominant frame that had then
assigned that remembrance to the Jews.
Considering the now high level of analysis, it is not surprising that
questions about framing become more complex. To trace how-and
which-past is made to matter, we also need to ask: by whom, to whom,
when, where, and why. If we stay close to the empirical ground, as I do
here, we immediately recognize that rarely are these issues settled within
public discourse, on however limited a scale. Even within the relatively
small community of Vietnam veterans, for example, we would find great
dissonance in publicly voiced views about their experience and its
"proper place" in Americans' memory; all this before we would begin to
inquire about their private accounts and actions. Disagreements, how-
ever, often make our analysis manageable. The otherwise dormant fram-
ing strategies then become articulated and open to our inspection.
Collective memory becomes activated, as it were, allowing for more
direct access to its construction. This also happens when people engage
in what I call "memory projects" -concerted efforts to secure presence
for certain elements of the past, efforts often coupled with self-justifying
rationales.
Disputes, discussions, introduction of altogether new frames-these
are all heuristically invaluable opportunities for students of the dynamics
of collective memory. They also remind us, and in North America such
reminders may indeed be quite necessary, that our subject matter matters.
Different people, at different times, care about their past in different
 Setting the Analytical Parameters 9

ways. Some kill because of memory obligations. Some demand political

change. And some are content to look to the future, even if entertained
by stories of past adventures.
How-and how much-people care is, as we observed before, strong-
ly influenced by idiosyncratic factors. But equally strongly, it is informed
by the socially shared "frames of remembrance." If the roles assigned to
the past are by no means constant, even within a given community, there
are at least two reasons why collective memory is a factor in human
affairs we must reckon with. First, collective memory is intricately
related, though in variable ways, to the sense of collective identity
individuals come to acquire. And second, it is imbued with moral
imperatives-the obligations to one's kin, notions of justice, indeed, the
lessons of right and wrong-that form the basic parts of the normative
order. On both counts, collective memory is then a significant orienting
force, or, something we need to understand better in order to account for
why people do what they do.
It may well be that seeing collective memory in this light is the result
of my being European; I know that when first introduced to the subject,
my students in southwestern Ontario look interested but also puzzled.
And yet, if they start out with the notion that the past is at best a pleasant
diversion, after a little coaching they too have no trouble recognizing
how much their family bonds rely on shared reminiscing-or how
inadequate their knowledge of Canadian history is for dealing with the
country's constitutional (and identity) crisis. They also become quick to
point out how their high school training had not prepared them to
understand current world events, with the bloody conflict between Serbs
and Croats being perhaps the most baffling. Here, it is not simply that
they lack the background information, but more importantly, they have
few means of empathizing with the peoples for whom the past so clearly
matters. The issue is not academic, either. There are many Serbs and
Croats living in our area and while not yet violent, mutual hostility has
been high.
Students in Ontario are only required to take one Grade 9 Canadian
history course to graduate, I should add. And I suspect that even with a
more structured curriculum, they would still be ill prepared to understand
the feelings of their Croatian friend. If the interest in collective memory
has increased dramatically in recent years, we are still very far from
mainstream status as explainers of social dynamics. This book is written
10 Frames of Remembrance

with the hope that some day in the future, after a great deal more work
is done, an appreciation of the dynamics of collective memory might
indeed belong in the classroom.
Such an appreciation can only come about through a combined effort
of scholars from a variety of disciplines; indeed, as the listings of our
annotated bibliography suggest, both the interest and the research can
already be found in many analytical comers. My own perspective, being
that of a cultural sociologist, is not exclusionary; it might, in effect,
predispose me to be academically democratic, as it were, to welcome
insights and inquiries from history and media criticism, anthropology
and political science, psychology and literary studies. To render justice
to the phenomenon itself, to the varied manifestations of collective
memory and remembrance, we must, I believe, rely on varied interpretive
strategies. At the same time, though, we do need to establish more
linkages between them, more of an analytically shared vocabulary.
Present reflections are a step in this direction.
Two facets of academic life impede much of this needed bridge
building. There is the common affliction of rigid disciplinary boundaries,
strongly affecting our graduate training in particular. If some of the
barriers have come down, many more are still there, preventing an
effective use of each other's knowledge. More serious, though, for it is
more difficult to overcome, is the natural division of labor along temporal
and cultural lines. Someone who is interested in contemporary America
may readily step out of the sociology department to talk to colleagues in
film studies; chances are, however, that a colloquium on Nazi Germany,
further down the hall, would be passed unnoticed, as would a talk by a
visiting Lithuanian scholar. Ordinarily, this is not a problem. But for a
student of the uses of the past, it may represent a serious loss of analytical
opportunities for testing one's questions on another empirical terrain.
Working towards a better understanding of the dynamics of collective
memory means that we cannot afford such lost opportunities. This book
was conceived, in part, as a "meeting place" allowing for an exchange
of ideas, concerns, and findings. The annotated bibliography is of neces-
sity selective and aims at presenting just how wide the range of the
potential participants here is. As a host to this gathering, I wanted for the
occasion to be interesting enough to attend, thus the analytical offerings.
Ideally, the reader would come to take part in this exchange by thinking
through the issues raised with the help of materials on his or her shelves.
 Setting the Analytical Parameters 11

Admittedly not a perfect strategy for academic communication, this is as

close as we can approximate a dialogue.
As the host, I have both the responsibility and the opportunity to
facilitate the flow of conversation, to provide the opening lines. Under-
standably, I feel more comfortable with topics I know something about.
Thus the reader is advised to expect illustrations and examples originat-
ing in the areas of my own research, or more broadly, my interest. These
do cover a large territory, still, it is highly unlikely I would be connecting
to all the equally idiosyncratic points of interest among the readers. This
is why the book calls on your input for our "meeting" to succeed.
A note of caution is in order. As those readers with the useful habit of
scanning references and the index first would have undoubtedly noticed,
I devote considerable space and attention to issues concerning memory
of the Holocaust. In part, this is simply a reflection of my particular
research itinerary; to make sense of contemporary Polish-Jewish rela-
tions, I had to make sense of both what had happened to the Jews and its
subsequent tellings. To do this properly, in tum, demanded a comparative
perspective. Indeed, that challenge of making sense-of the past, of its
memory-was what prompted my venturing into the larger terrain of the
cultural analysis of "frames of remembrance." And many of the ques-
tions, concerns, ideas reflected here originate in that work. I fully
recognize, though, that what to me is a logical extension of prior analyti-
cal efforts can appear to others as a jarring presence, a forced confronta-
tion with material they would rather avoid. Deciding not to tone down
my voice, as it were, might prove problematic for these readers. I am
convinced, though, that the intellectual returns of this strategy far out-
weigh the emotional risks. There is a great deal to be learned, for any
student of the dynamics of collective memory, from the extensive re-
search on ways of remembering (and forgetting) the Holocaust. As an
area of scholarship, it is one where interdisciplinary lines have long been
crossed, thus providing a valuable model for the type of analysis advo-
cated here. Most importantly, perhaps, delving into the problematics of
Holocaust memory forces us to ask some rather disquieting questions
about our own critical efforts. The continuous search for the "right" ways
to remember, with all the voices of doubt and dissent that accompany it,
is not only a testimony to the unique challenges the Holocaust poses but
it is also a powerful corrective on our valued certainties, all those tacit
principles we ordinarily apply when critically assessing others' memory
12 Frames of Remembrance

work. It is a reminder that as we study what people do, both they and we
would be involved in establishing standards for what "ought to be done."
And even if ours are more sophisticated, perhaps, theirs are equally
important to consider. At the same time, since the evaluative criteria we
use have a tremendous impact on the analytical process, we should at
least make an effort at self-reflection.
What is the value we place on "telling the truth" and why? What do
we see as legitimate and illegitimate uses of the past? When do we
become angry at trespassing the lines of good taste? How do we decide
that something/someone ought to be remembered?
Bringing such questions into clear focus serves a dual purpose, even
if we cannot come up with clear answers. It makes for a more intellec-
tually and morally honest inquiry. And it sensitizes us to the importance
of these issues in the social practices of framing remembrance.
Just yesterday (January 20, 1992), the Berlin Regional Court con-
victed two former East German border guards of killing a man they saw
fleeing to the West; in rendering the verdict, the judge invoked the
injustice of the Nazi system to show how some laws should never be
obeyed. The case sparked wide debate and understandably so. It is not at
all clear that punishing those (and so far only those) at the end point in a
whole chain of command is morally right. And it is also problematic,
clearly good intentions notwithstanding, for a German judge to equate
Communism with Nazism. Since it is precedent setting, the verdict would
likely be appealed, thus also allowing us to gain further insight into the
negotiating of rules remembrance is to obey.
In this case, and in many others of this nature/ our position as
analytical observers cannot be separated from our ethical stance. Nor
should it be. To pretend moral neutrality on morally troubling issues
would be exactly that, pretence. At the same time, as we work to
understand the dynamics of collective memory, we need to tune in to all
the different voices, those we agree with as well as those we find
reprehensible. And sometimes, we may have to say that we too do not
know the "right" answers. Our task, in any case, is not to provide them.
Rather, it is to trace the social practices that give particular frames of
remembrance shape and stability, those used in repair work and those
with demolition potential.
The imagery of "industrial production" applied here is not accidental.
Heuristically, it is helpful to think of collective memory in very concrete
 Setting the Analytical Parameters 13

terms indeed. First, to secure a presence for the past demands work-
"memory work"-whether it is writing a book, filming a documentary
or erecting a monument. Produced, in effect, is what I call here the
"infrastructure" of collective memory, all the different spaces, objects,
"texts" that make an engagement with the past possible. 8 The tasks are
as varied as the forms such an infrastructure can take; as mentioned
before, several people could be involved, each doing different things,
before the "final product" emerges. At times, efforts on many smaller
construction jobs combine, in their desired effect, into a "memory
project"; the work of feminists for the inclusion of women in our sense
of history would be a good example here. At times, the work is done not
to build but to destroy; the bringing down of monuments to Communist
heroes in many parts of the collapsed Soviet empire comes to mind.
To recognize the concreteness of memory work is also to be usefully
reminded of its mundane, yet analytically important qualities. That work
takes time, energy, and money, and resources are often in short supply
and carefully allocated. The very process of production is thus frequently
a site for articulating priorities, obligations, goals, and intended audien-
ces. As such, it is a valuable source of data for students of framing
remembrance; looking at the construction of the Vietnam War Memorial,
with all the subsequent modifications, is but one example of just how
rich this material can be. Even when not much public discussion takes
place, the very presence of community involvement-or government
sponsorship or commercial interests-provides us with valuable clues as
to what is going on. 9 Who deems the past important and why cannot
always be completely derived from such clues, but it is a good start. In
other words, people's actions, as well as their declarations, matter. When
the municipal authorities in Berlin decided (in 1991) yet again to
postpone the building of a Jewish museum due to budget considerations,
they were indeed making a statement.
If observing what memory work gets done offers us suggestive
material on the vicissitudes of remembrance, it becomes indispensable
when trying to assess the degree of social forgetting. A community
can-and often would-preserve memories of its past primarily through
private tellings; it is rare, though, not to encounter some physical markers
aiding the process. When even the minimal signs of memory work are
missing, when graves are left invisible and unattended, for example, or
stories remain untold, these are strong indications indeed of a past
14 Frames of Remembrance

confined to oblivion. -And they are analytically irreplaceable, because we

cannot simply ask people what they have been forgetting.
Investigating the dynamics of collective memory by focusing on the
work that gets done (or not) is only a step, though an important one,
towards better understanding of the subject. The production of symbolic
resources makes certain forms of engagement with the past possible,
sometimes even necessary, but it does not predetermine the uses to which
such resources would be put. And indeed, if we were to take a snapshot
of a particular collective memory, we would fmd a great deal of traces
of the past that are dormant, as it were, left unattended. Books or
buildings, exhibits or movies, these may all just be there, with only a few
individuals giving them a thought. Just as in our private lives, cherished
mementoes of the trips we took need not engage our attention-but we
keep them around for comfort-the day-to-day social practices need not
involve drawing from the storehouse of collective memory. When they
do, when our sense of the past becomes "activated," memory becomes
remembrance. At those times we do pay attention; whether through a
commemorative gesture, a heated discussion or simply a moment of
reflection, we are engaged with the past. Assuming such an active stance
may translate into creative memory work, resulting in new ways of
making sense. But it does not have to; we may be equally content with
using the material already at hand. Most likely, we would encounter
mixtures of the two modes; a yearly celebration of Passover, for example,
with its core story of the Jews' exodus from Egypt, might include varied
references to contemporary struggles for freedom, calling for new forms
of ritual observance.
Working towards a better understanding of the dynamics of collective
memory does mean that the attention here is directed primarily towards
the more active aspects of our engagement with the past. Inquiring into
what people say, do or make, whether when producing new resources or
using/adapting the old ones is analytically rather different from the
content-oriented studies of "texts." One is still required to interpret a
given set of materials, be it schoolbooks or a television series. But this
is now only a component in a larger heuristic task, where "texts" are never
separated from social practices surrounding them. Textual analysis be-
comes a valuable companion to other context-specific interpretive
strategies. 10
 Setting the Analytical Parameters 15

Situating "texts" in their cultural and sociopolitical contexts is always

a challenge; deciding which information counts and which does not is
part and parcel of the inquiry itself, unless one adopts a theoretically
derived single vision approach, that is. My own preference, lying with
the empirically grounded, inductive strategies, does mean that before a
final account takes shape, there is a certain "messy" complexity to sort
through. Part of that complexity -and a challenge unique to students of
collective memory-is "the past" itself. What we are investigating, after
all, are the different ways of constructing a "reality of the past," be it by
participants, artists, or scholars. 11 In the process, we often become acutely
aware of just how tentative is the status of particular "historical truths."
At the very least, we would be confronted with differences of interpreta-
tion of given events. It is not rare, though, to encounter disagreements
about the most basic facts and figures. Yet as sensitive as we become to
biases, distortions, gaps, and contradictions in the presentations of "the
past," our very ability to detect them rests on us constructing a baseline
historical reality, as it were. And just as much as we ought to reflect on
our ethical principles, our convictions about what it is that actually
happened also demand some self-scrutiny.
At times, deciding on a base line does not pose any great problems;
when we trust particular historians and their professional expertise, we
might still study their rhetorical strategies but remain confident in their
findings. At other times, and this was very much my experience, it takes
considerable effort to develop and justify trust in some accounts versus
others; with writings on Polish-Jewish history filled with doubt-en-
gendering statements, unwarranted generalizations and mutual invec-
tives, I had to rely on an all-out critical and comparative reading to come
up with the most rudimentary reality. Most of the time, I think, a student
of collective memory operates in the multishaded grey zone between
those two extremes. And however much we trust (or distrust) the his-
torians, we cannot do without their help. Indeed, our own efforts are not
unlike theirs, which ought to limit any self-righteous indictments on our
part. In other words, as we proceed to question how the different
"historical truths" are being established, we must recognize we too are
doing it.
How people make sense of the past-intellectually, emotionally,
morally-is not reducible, though, to the "truth" of their accounts. The
stories of soldiers' camaraderie, emerging from the trenches of Verdun
16 Frames of Remembrance

or the jungle of Vietnam are not "false"; rather, they testify to the human
ability to find inspiration in the midst of the harshest of realities. Our
knowledge of what happened, and especially the empathetic under-
standing of the actors' experience, is now indispensable for making sense
of how such memories are constructed. It is not that we can simply
deduce, from the "raw" reality at hand, the forms of future remembrance.
We cannot. But appreciating that not all pasts are created equal, that
traumas, for example, pose demands quite unlike the appeal of victories,
gives us the essential tools for critical assessment of memory work.
Arriving at an historical base line thus serves two purposes. It allows
us to evaluate different tellings about the past, most notably, to see what
has been included-and excluded-within the various "texts." And,
when dealing with the construction of memories still grounded in lived
experience, it greatly enriches our ability to interpret the work being
done.
Yet whether we study the efforts to secure a presence for the immediate
past, or debates about Columbus and his legacy, we cannot do without
another kind of historical base line- the context of memory work itself.
Once again, deciding which among the social, political, cultural, or
psychological factors of potential relevance should be given priority is
no easy task. Whenever possible, comparative analysis is now of great
value. When I studied memories of the Holocaust, for example, it was
only after considerable research on France, North America, and both
Germanies that I could make distinctions between the effects of
psychological trauma, moral indifference, and political motivation on the
texture of Holocaust remembrance I found in Poland. 12
Factoring in of the mundane demands of time and money complicates
the picture even further. That in Japan, commemorating the tragedy of
Hiroshima has very much overshadowed remembering Nagasaki is at
least partly a result of the early morning ceremonies in Hiroshima fitting
conveniently within the live news broadcasts in a way that those later, in
Nagasaki, do not. 13 While this might be a rather extreme example of the
power of the media, there is no question that students of the dynamics of
collective memory in the age of television face different issues than those
analyzing earlier times. As a medium, television may indeed be a
supreme recording device, yet in its varied actual uses, it can just as easily
promote forgetting-when it chases after the next "big story," or inun-
dates us with images of little personal relevance. And, once again, context
 Setting the Analytical Parameters 17

specificity is a must. What may be crucial in a commercial television-

saturated environment of North America is of secondary importance in
a country such as France, where public discourse still privileges print. 14
In trying to account for the memory work being done, we often
privilege circumstances of the moment. Especially when the "reality of
the past" under construction is of events far distant in time-or when
dealing with mythic inventions-we would justifiably focus on the
immediate context of the present efforts. Deep immersion in the ex-
perience of Columbus and his fellow explorers-or empathy with the
aboriginal populations of the Americas-is not going to help us much in
disentangling the lines of the current debates. But if there are indeed
sectors of our analytical territory that require only scant knowledge of
the past itself, these are exceptions, not the rule. For the most part,
understanding the dynamics of collective memory demands from us
keeping both the past and the work done on it in the foreground. Striking
the proper balance between the two "data bases" is not an easy task.
Indeed, it may be the most difficult aspect of the efforts to contextualize
specific "texts."
The challenge is to recognize ~":tt as much as "realities of the past"
are indeed socially constructed, the prG-.:Qss is not a discursive free-for-
al1.15 We have by now become so familiar with accounts of how history
can be rewritten, manipulated for political ends, forgotten, or embel-
lished, that we may be at risk of losing from view the experiential bases
on which collective memory rests. In the most direct terms, as people
first articulate and share the sense they make of their past, it is their
experience, in all its emotional complexity, that serves as the key refer-
ence point. If their interpretive strategies are indeed products of culture,
the plausibility of resulting accounts depends on the fit with the
individuals' emotional reality. Someone who suffered great physical pain
is not likely to define what happened as a pleasant diversion. A soldier
who killed civilians may accept that it was all part of his duties, or adopt
the more morally challenging position that it should have been up to him
to decide; that soldier, though, could not as easily be convinced that
nothing happened at all, even as he tries to forget. The sense that others
are making of one's experience, in short, can only fall within a certain
range.
In the less direct terms, when the past we attend to is not ours, the
experiential base principle translates into the common sense idea that
18 Frames of Remembrance

"memory" has a referent, a reality it connects us to. In ordinary usage,

which as students of social life we are well advised to appreciate, all the
terms connected to remembering follow this intuitive rule. Collective
memory, by virtue of it representing mostly the pasts we have no
experiential access to, cannot be subject to the same reality checks as
discussed above. But it is subject to similar expectations, indeed, it draws
its plausibility claims from the commonly perceived connection to lived
human experience. Even, or perhaps especially, stories with no base in
reality would frequently present themselves as accounts of actual
events. 16
This close connection to experience, whether real or imaginary,
bounds collective memory in a number of ways. Certain stories are
judged as plausible, others as not. And certain ways of remembering (and
forgetting) are seen as appropriate and others as not. A narrative of
victimization can serve to bolster group identity or to support political
claims, it cannot be the basis for joyous celebration. Yes, we do use the
past to various ends, and yes, we often liberally mix facts and fiction, if
not inventing altogether. But no, collective memory is not a terrain where
anything goes. 17 And indeed, part of our analytical task is to uncover the
rules, the normative orders of remembrance.
These too are socially constructed; attitudes to death and rituals of
mourning, for example, vary across time and cultures. But they are not
arbitrary, in the sense of not bearing any relationship to the perceived
qualities of the experience to be remembered. As I discovered when
studying Poland's treatment of the Holocaust, it is possible for a people
to define a trauma away; it certainly was possible to hear some Poles
commenting on the destruction of the Jews as a job well done. And once
this definition was in place, it would take hard work indeed to create an
obligation to grieve. When a loss is not recognized as a loss, grieving is
not natural. That the death of three million Polish Jews had not been a
traumatic event for the majority of Poles could not be explained, how-
ever, by the powers of persuasion of the postwar rhetoric. Rather, it had
its sources in the long history of seeing the Jew as outside of the Polish
family of moral obligation, and the acute traumatization the Poles them-
selves suffered during the Second World War. The vicissitudes of their
collective memory could not be detached from those of their subjective
experience.
 Setting the Analytical Parameters 19

The stress here should be on the term "subjective," for however certain
we may be, based on historical knowledge, that something actually
happened, it is the definition shared by people we study which matters.
In my case, there was a rather radical difference between the observer's
and the participants' realities. It need not be so, of course. But whether
the past as we understand it and the past as understood by our subjects
are closer or further apart, we ought to consider both in our analysis. Our
base line is a needed standard for critical judgment, their base line is what
informs remembrance.
How such a subjective version of history comes to be is an important
empirical question. As I have suggested here, individual memories of
directly lived experience matter a great deal. But beyond this realm of
immediate reality, as it were, lies a much larger territory of mediated past,
the territory we have in focus when looking at the collective memory.
And if we can posit that what people find there helps them to form their
own views, to establish emotional and moral links with the past, the
"how?" is very much open to further investigation. We know, for ex-
ample, that the "official" version of history carries different weight in
different political systems-and for different groups within a society;
those who identify with it are likely to be people with power. What about
the marginal groups, though? Theoretical arguments abound here; 18 I
believe it is best, once again, to stay close to the empirical ground. It is
entirely possible that when more research returns are in, we would be
able to refine many a general rule, to allow for the "it depends." And the
same holds for virtually all of the specific areas we study-the role of
particular history textbooks, monuments, architectural landmarks,
movies, family tales, museums, parades, or magazine articles needs to
be established, not assumed.
The context-sensitive approach advocated here does not readily trans-
late into theoretical labels. The best approximation may be the image of
an intellectual "bricoleur," someone ready to try out various tools and
strategies borrowed from many academic quarters in order to piece
together a complex puzzle. The resulting picture has to make sense, but
it could easily contradict established disciplinary certainties. And
throughout, one remains sceptical of universal claims and explanations,
reflective towards one's own tacit assumptions, open to empirical
surprises.
20 Frames of Remembrance

The work of a bricoleur is not easy to describe; the few procedural

suggestions outlined here spell out only the basic directions for context-
specificity, the detail is by definition dependent on the research area itself.
The thrust of the work is unabashedly antireductionist. Using insights of
psychoanalysis, to take but one example, is acceptable as long as other
ideas are also invited to play a part in the interpretive process.
In and of itself, the empirical orientation of our bricoleur s inquiries
does not set limits on topics to be considered. In actual research practice,
though, it tends to privilege subjects of greater social relevance over those
with purely theoretical interest. Considering how the future of what once
was the Soviet empire may very well depend on the rules established
there for dealing with the Communist past, the fact that the whole region
becomes a "laboratory" for students of collective memory is an added
bonus, not the reason to get on with the work.
The following essays aim to accommodate this-in my view
laudable-preoccupation with matters of social significance. Broadly
speaking, concerns with identity formation, legitimacy, and moral order
are what frequently bring scholars to the field in the first place. At the
same time, though, I think it is important, at this, still early stage of our
analytical endeavors also to look into other, less "lofty" areas where
theoretical gains may be equally high. The diversity of means we use to
construct "realities of the past" alone necessitates a warm welcome to
students of various ways of telling, whatever their particular subject. And
our understanding of the roles played by collective memory can only be
enriched by inquiries that illuminate the obscure, the unnoticed, the
seemingly trivial. Staying close to the empirical grounds, in contem-
porary North America, for example, may demand that just as much
attention be paid to Disney's theme parks as to disputes about Columbus.
To put it in somewhat different terms, the study of the dynamics of
collective memory can be approached as both a "pure" and an "applied
science." My own predispositions notwithstanding, the development of
sound analytical strategies in this area depends on insights generated on
many empirical and theoretical grounds, on inquiries informed by social,
ethical, as well as sociological concerns. The questions addressed in this
book reflect such heterogeneity of the analysis itself, ranging from the
rather formal investigation of the "division of labor" on memory con-
struction jobs to the very pragmatic demand for a better grasp of the
potential for violence inherent in memory conflicts. Reflecting on the
 Setting the Analytical Parameters 21

challenges of remembering the Holocaust is in tum a means to question

our questions-and certainties. It is a reminder that as students of
collective memory, we, together with ordinary people, are now facing
the limits to our long taken-for-granted ability to know how to remember.
To render problematic what may otherwise be taken for granted, by
both our subjects and ourselves, could indeed be said to define this book
as a whole. The readers are welcome, no, encouraged, to disagree with
me. All that I ask for is that they join me in reflection, open to the ideas
that confirm as well as unsettle theirs.

Notes

l. Pioneered in France (for the classic formulation, see Maurice Halbwachs, La

mt!moire collective [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968]), this approach
has only recently gained ground among the English-speaking scholars. Collective
Remembering, ed. David Middleton and Derek Edwards (London: Sage, 1990) is a
good example of the still strong legacies of psychological views. Memory and
Counter-Memory, ed. Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Starn, special issue of
Representations 26 (Spring 1989) helps to place the interest in collective memory
within the wider shifts in the studies of culture.
2. For the best illustration of how empirical materials enrich our theoretical under-
standing, see Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory: How We Remem-
ber, Forget and Reconstruct the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
3. See, especially Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk (Philadelphia: University of Pen-
nsylvania Press, 1981) and Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis. An Essay on the
Organization of Experience (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986).
4. I am grateful to Judith Balfe for bringing this memorial to my attention.
5. For the most extensive treatment of this issue, see David Lowenthal, The Past is a
Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
6. During a presentation to the Annual Scholars' Conference on Church Struggle and
the Holocaust, Washington, March 1989.
7. By 1993, after several attempts at rendering justice at the highest levels of the
officialdom in post-Communist countries, it is becoming more evident just how
difficult the process is. For an insightful discussion of the situation in Germany, see
Amos Elon, "East Germany: Crime and Punishment," The New York Review (May
14, 1992):6-11.
8. The idea parallels that of Pierre Nora and his collaborators studying "les lieux de
memoire" in France (in a multivolume work, beginning in 1982, Paris: Gallimard).
9. On this issue, Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation
of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1991), is an especially
rich analysis.
10. For one of the best examples of the high returns when pursuing this strategy, see
Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhall, Iwo lima: Monuments, Memories, and the
American Hero (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).
11. An alternative approach, with stress on the habitual, bodily memories is presented
in Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University
22 Frames of Remembrance

Press, 1989). While I fmd it useful for understanding social practices, most of the
work on the dynamics of collective memory demands that we pay attention to the
"what happened" questions.
12. See Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Neutralizing Memory: The Jew in Contemporary Poland
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1989). [Unless otherwise indicated,
further references to my work are to this book.]
13. Norma Field, In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: A Portrait of Japan at Century's
End (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991), 179.
14. The relation between television and print media is not of simple opposition, of
course. But the fact that for years, one of the most popular prime time shows in
France was "Apostrophes" -an hour and a half discussion on current books-gives
my Canadian students a pause.
15. See also Michael Schudson, "The Present in the Past versus the Past in the Present,"
Communication ll (1989):105-113.
16. For a strong challenge to the 'fact vs fiction' perspective, offering an intricate
analysis of the narrative genres instead, see James Fentress and Chris Wickham,
Social Memory (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992).
17. On this point, I clearly hope to counter the influence of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence
Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983).
18. For a useful introduction, see Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani, eds., Remaking
History. Dia Art Foundation Discussions in Contemporary Culture no. 4 (Seattle:
Bay Press, 1989).
 2

Ultimate Challenge

Much of the time, when we attend to the past, we rather safely assume
that we can find proper ways of remembering. Equipped with cultural
traditions, moral guidelines, and the wide variety of symbolic systems,
we have little reason to doubt our capability to do a decent job. Allowing
for the fact that our knowledge of the past can never be fully adequate,
we proceed with the telling of stories, commemoration rituals, building
of monuments. We often disagree about what should be done and how,
of course, but during such disputes the idea that it is indeed possible to
know is, if anything, strengthened. The standards for judging memory
work vary, but their very presence is again something we ordinarily take
for granted. As analysts, we may employ the more sophisticated criteria
than those explicated in public debates-and we do revise them from
time to time-but we can hardly afford disposing with standards al-
together. The notion that "anything goes" on the construction of collec-
tive memory is too intellectually and morally unsettling. Even accepting
that our answers are provisional, we need to believe there is a "right"
way to remember.
Corollary to this is our need to trust in the communicative power of
the basic tools we use-language, visuals, sounds, actions, gestures. Here
too, there are many shifts of style, disputes over meaning, with tech-
nological developments having their own profound effects. But here too,
the very availability of such tools is mostly taken for granted; to question
it would, after all, imply questioning our human abilities as producers of
symbols.
Usually, those two layers of certainty need barely be acknowledged
as one proceeds with the analytical task at hand. That people are capable
of constructing a collective memory is so basic a premise it can hardly

23
24 Frames of Remembrance

carry much explanatory weight. What interests us is the process and the
results, all within that complex web we define as social context. If there
are limits to what is being remembered, such can surely be traced along
the political or cultural paths. In short, delving into the preconditions for
memory work seems superfluous, a theoretical or philosophical exercise
at best.
Most of the time we are right to pursue such strategies. If we tune in
our inquiries to the significant experiences out there in the world-as I
have tried to do here-engaging in elaborate theorizing on the possibility
of remembrance would not appear a priority. And yet, precisely because
one has adopted an empirically driven approach, questions about ways
and tools of memory construction must enter the analytical agenda. For
such questions have been asked and continue to be asked, most centrally
when reflecting on memory of the Holocaust. 1
In Warsaw, the Jewish ghetto created by the Nazis occupied many
blocks in the center of the city; of some 400,000 of its inhabitants, few
survived; the buildings themselves were methodically razed to the
ground after the 1943 uprising. After the war, Polish authorities decided
to build on top of the ruins, literally covering up the remnants of human
habitation, including the bodies buried there. Within a few years, only
some street names and a monument to the ghetto fighters were left to
speak of the past. Should something else have been done?
In Berlin, now again the capital of Germany, the buildings once
housing the Nazi headquarters remained virtually intact. During the
1970s, and then the 1980s, the city governments (Western side) at-
tempted, unsuccessfully, to gain a consensus as to what should be done
with the abandoned site; proposals ranged from museums to a gaping
hole in the landscape. 2 The question remains open.
At the other extreme of those problematics of memory space, there is
the challenge of grieving without graves. Most of the six million Jews
who perished were not accorded the dignity of proper burial. With whole
communities destroyed, in Central and Eastern Europe, the old
cemeteries too were often abandoned or worse, destroyed by the locals.
In the Jewish tradition, funeral rites have great and sacred significance.
What becomes of mourning when there is no place?
What becomes of remembrance when there are so few spaces left?
The Jewish presence in communities throughout Eastern Europe left
hardly any physical traces; buildings were either deliberately destroyed
 Ultimate Challenge 25

by the Nazis, ravaged by war or abandoned to decay later. When left

standing, synagogues, for example, would serve as warehouses. The
destruction of markers of Jewish life, if not as total as in Warsaw,
proceeded beyond repair. Could it have been otherwise when the com-
munity was no more?
The questions raised here are both about the relationship between
memory and space and about the obligations to remember. It was and
still is not at all clear who ought to act as a memory keeper for Jews in
Poland in particular, those Polish Jews who had once lived there and those
European Jews who were killed in the camps.
Survivors implicitly answered that question when they severed their
connection to Poland; memory keeping would be very much their task
and responsibility, but without any support from the spaces left behind.
Over the last few years, with a marked shift of attitudes on the part of
Polish authorities, the question has been reopened, as Jews now par-
ticipate in efforts to restore some memory markers. It is recognized by
both sides that the physical presence of Jews, both in life and in death,
on the Polish soil ought to be remembered. It is as if, after considerable
delay, the places' haunting voice would be listened to. But, just as in
Berlin, this willingness to listen does not translate into any clear sense of
direction. What we should allow the spaces to tell us, we do not know.
The issue is not theoretical; the work involved is of practical nature
indeed-restoring a building, cleaning up a cemetery, placing memorial
plaques, rewriting guidebooks for tourists, or leaving things as they were,
all involve bureaucratic decisions and financial considerations. If the
results so far appear haphazard, it is because they are, owing much to
local circumstances and individual involvement. There is no "grand
plan," perhaps there cannot be, since to designate priorities would mean
to know how to remember something that had never happened before.
The Holocaust was an unique event, and people were totally un-
prepared to accept it at the time; today, we may still be unprepared. But
it is not the only event challenging our. ability to remember. Mass
atrocities, on a scale previously unknown, have marked this century.
Millions of civilians died in wars or at the hands of their own govern-
ments. The kinds of questions raised in reflecting on the Holocaust are
unfortunately becoming central to our understanding of the human
condition in many parts of the world. Owing much to my own experience
as a child of a Holocaust survivor, but also to the richness of literature in
26 Frames of Remembrance

this area, the following discussion focuses on the vicissitudes of

remembrance "after Auschwitz." What it is set to illuminate, though, is
the universal dilemma of confronting the ultimate evil.
To secure remembrance, one must first be able to tell what happened.
Experience must be named, words found to describe it in detail,
metaphors perhaps added for further depth. With memory of the
Holocaust, this is where the problem begins. The very term "Holocaust,"
introduced in the late 1960s as shorthand for the near total destruction of
European Jews, is problematic. 3 Etymologically referring to burnt offer-
ings, it invites a theological interpretation to deaths so difficult to
reconcile with a presence of God. To speak of the "Final Solution" is
historically correct, but it also gives the Nazi worldview the kind of
prominence one would rather avoid. Recently, the Hebrew word Shoah
has been widely adopted, both in English and in French, its neutral
meaning of destruction recognized as most appropriate. Yet in popular
parlance, "Holocaust" is still the term of choice; few are aware of its
symbolic resonance. Now, the problem lies in its very popularity, as more
and more crisis situations are being described as holocausts. A name that
was to secure the sense of uniqueness thus begins to fail.
Language itself fails us, and yet we must speak-such could be the
motto of writings about the Holocaust, fiction and non-fiction. The
betrayal starts with numbers and adjectives. Numbers, since when one
speaks of the "six million" who died, one crosses the limits of emotional
intelligibility. Adjectives, since the words "tragic," "horrific," or even
"evil" are not strong enough. Nouns are not very helpful either; terms
like "camp," "selection," "resistance" evoke imagery that obscures rather
than illuminates reality of the times.
Language is an universalizing tool; words we use immediately evoke
experiences we can relate to. Describing what happened during the
Holocaust means describing experiences we cannot-and ultimately
ought not-relate to. This basic challenge may explain why "Auschwitz"
has acquired such symbolic potency, for it is, for Westerners at least, an
essentially untransferable term; what it speaks of is only the Holocaust.
(In Poland, though, this does not apply; for one, the camp's name
Oswiecim is also the name of a town close by; more importantly, as there
were many Polish prisoners in the camp, the connection with Jewish
suffering is not there.) The choice of Auschwitz may be historically
problematic, in that it was the site of a great deal more than the exter-
 Ultimate Challenge 27

mination of the Jews. But it reflects the fate of memory more than history;
in Auschwitz, there were survivors, many of whom went on to write about
it-Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Charlotte Delbo, and others.
The search for the right words has led in many different directions,
from minimalist simplicity to elaborately metaphorical expression; writ-
ings on the Holocaust exhibit an immense range of styles. Critical
analysis of those writings is by now a large field of scholarship. Yet as
critical standards develop, and a certain degree of academic consensus
is established, it also becomes increasingly clear that the basic question
about proper ways of remembering is not likely to be settled, at least not
at the center.4
Where a semblance of agreement emerges is at the margins, now not
only of literary endeavors but symbolic production in general. The
growing supply of pornography and kitsch, 5 if anything else, prompts
loud protests from within and outside academia. Both categories are
inherently difficult precisely to define, of course, but the strength of
visceral reaction against eroticizing Nazism, for example, may not need
definition. Yet if the little cottage industry in Nazi paraphernalia is
something most people would find troubling, the wide use of "Hitler" to
describe political opponents warranted few comments indeed during the
Gulf War.
The negative standards, quite naturally, gain more public exposure.
Outside the group of specialists, few people are familiar with the reflec-
tion on remembering the Holocaust. When the line of decency is crossed,
however, and the debate moves to the popular media, vast numbers of
nonspecialists learn the line exists. This selective attention may partly
account for a general perception of Holocaust remembrance as solid,
established, unproblematic. Coupled with the undeniable growth of
films, books, memorials, and courses, the impression is easily created
that if anything, this memory is all too well taken care of. In relative
quantitative terms, this is quite true. Even with glasnost, we are still far
from having a similarly extensive memory base about mass murders in
the Soviet Union, to take the most immediate comparison. But in terms
of finding the right ways of remembering, the multiplicity speaks of the
continuous search, a search in which what some see as overexposure is
yet another attempt at finding answers. With memory of the Holocaust,
it appears that all of the basic questions are left open, from who is to be
remembered to who is to remember, from when to where and how. For
28 Frames of Remembrance

the analyst, it might be all too natural to adopt one of the developed
approaches as the right one-and that includes myself. But demanding
as it may be, if we are to be faithful to the phenomenon we study, we
ought to recognize the full diversity of remembrance proposals. At issue
is not some form of relativism, but rather an acknowledgment that, at
least for now, few standards exist. It is the search that matters.
The who/when/where/how questions can rarely be neatly separated.
To take one of the more difficult challenges-honoring the heroes-at
issue here is a whole web of problems. Defining heroic behavior on the
part of non-Jews during the Holocaust seems straightforward enough;
those who aided Jews at the risk to their own lives are indeed granted
special recognition by the State of Israel. What about Jews who did the
same, faced with much higher odds? 6 There, the recognition is only
beginning to emerge, as if helping one's own people would not quite
qualify for heroism. The attempt to preserve the traditional order of things
has led to immense concentration on honoring the Warsaw ghetto
fighters; the date on which the uprising in the ghetto began was also
chosen (after considerable debate) as the official day of commemoration
of the Holocaust in Israel and then the Diaspora. This emphasis troubles
many; Marek Edelman, today the only surviving leader of the uprising,
speaks with force about the equality of heroic death of those with arms
and those herded on the trains. 7 Indeed, when the ghetto fighters are
described as "those who died with dignity," as they often are, the dignity
of memory is at risk. Ought one then to abandon the very notion of a
hero? Or, perhaps, should we grant the honors to all who perished? But
if we do that, those Jews who collaborated with the Nazis come to receive
the same status as others.
Remembrance without heroes is also at high risk of anonymity.
Recognizing how easy it is to bracket the "six million" out from emo-
tional involvement, many of the people working in the area have made
a concerted effort to give the numbers individual faces. Even among
historians, still not very keen on describing the fate of ordinary men and
women, there has been a remarkable movement towards the particular;
filled with individual stories, Martin Gilbert's book on the Holocaust
represents one of the possible choices; 8 the collection of oral histories,
intensified now that the survivors grow older, represents another. Written
memoirs follow that pattern, and the immense impact of the television
 Ultimate Challenge 29

series Holocaust and The Diary of Anne Frank earlier points to its
resonance with human capacity to remember. 9
Empathy alone does not, though, make for understanding. And,
remembering the Holocaust does not just mean honoring its victims. It
is once we are outside the comparatively "safe" area of memory of
suffering that the challenges grow exponentially. Intellectually, the "not
to remember the past is to repeat it" idea compels a search for explana-
tions. Morally, this very search implicates wider and wider circles of
humanity. Remembrance becomes more and more uncomfortable, dis-
ruptive of our sense of the order of things. 10 And even if one accepts that
it was Auschwitz that had disrupted forever the secular and the sacred
order, it is not at all clear that remembering Auschwitz should mean the
same. In other words, we have an obligation to our present and future as
well as to our past, all entering the negotiations about the "proper" legacy.
Elsewhere in this book, I look at some of the debates surrounding the
definition of a "proper" place for memory of the Holocaust. Here, in
keeping with the overall theme, I would like to reflect on the more basic
issue of the "proper understanding" of that past. How such understanding
is understood informs both the work of discovery and the communication
of results. Whether for academic research, educational practices, or
artistic endeavors, "understanding" is the most crucial of tools. The
construction of collective memory employs different types of under-
standing, from dry scholarly knowledge to a visceral sense of the past,
each with different claims to truth and authenticity. Ordinarily, they
complement each other; ordinarily, people's expectations and responses
are very much informed by the distinct modes of understanding possible
within given formats. We might like historians to add a touch of poetry
to their writing, or a film about the American Civil War to be based on
facts, but we do not question their respective principles for putting
together a "reality of the past" (intellectual debates notwithstanding).
Memory of the Holocaust defies those general rules in a number of
ways. Neither scholars nor artists appear confident that they can "under-
stand," all the while they work to convey meaning of the events. The
lines separating knowledge and visceral feelings are often blurred. Ex-
pectations attached to formally different modes of remembrance cross
over as well. And more than once, memory workers acknowledge that
their task is an impossible one.
30 Frames of Remembrance

Most affected by the challenge is the community of scholars. For them

to admit that, ultimately, understanding is not possible, is to contradict
the fundamental rules of scientific inquiry. 11 As a sociologist, I am all too
aware of the common solution in my field to the predicament-and that
is to avoid the subject. Within the discipline, studying the Holocaust-
and genocide, and state-sponsored violence-occupies a tiny, marginal
spot on the agenda. 12 And the results of the few studies that had been
done are not very encouraging; it seems that standard sociological
questions do not fit well with the task at hand. 13 Recently, there began
some efforts to reformulate the questions and to invite wider participation
from sociologists; 14 it remains to be seen whether the shift can affect the
core of the disciplinary theory and practice.
Social sciences, in general, despite their claims to understanding
human behavior, have so far paid scant attention to the Holocaust.
Implicitly or explicitly, what happened to Jews during the Nazi period is
treated as an aberration, an exception, a departure from all norms-and
as such not warranting more than special case type of analysis. In-
dividually, political scientists or psychologists have done some ex-
emplary work in the area, but the subject remains marginal.
Persisting on the margins of social sciences allowed studies of the
Holocaust largely to avoid confrontation with the basic issue of "under-
standing." When covering a very specific and small aspect of the whole,
it is possible to avoid it. For at least one prominent historian, Michael
Martus, 15 it is indeed necessary to avoid it if the work is to get done at
all; advocating a form of return to "history as usual," Martus sees the
earlier, bold efforts to face the challenges of Auschwitz as commendable
but impractical in the long run. Professionals should not be awed by what
they study, they should not be disarmed by a sense of ultimate incom-
prehensibility. The argument is for more, not less, studies in the area but
also for a certain bracketing of emotions; the scaling down of aspirations
becomes a precondition for growth. Much along those lines, I recently
heard a history professor calling for total exclusion of visual materials
from courses on the Holocaust; 16 empathy with the victims, in his view,
morally blocks the students from asking critical questions about their
actions. Taking the argument for value-neutrality to its extreme, any form
of identification with those who suffered is thus prohibited in the name
of intellectual integrity. Emotional disengagement is what allows one to
understand the Holocaust as one would any other historical event.
 Ultimate Challenge 31

While most historians, by virtue of their craft, employ a degree of

detachment from their subject, few would agree that studying the
Holocaust is exactly the same as studying the Roman Empire, for
example. Fewer still would argue for writing and teaching strategies
devoid of empathetic dimension. 17 Historical accounts on the Holocaust
struggle with the limits of both scholarly and emotive language; they vary
widely in the balance between the two. Some offer insight into very
specific areas, some propose large, synthetic interpretations, many
operate inbetween. As we have already seen, there is also here a much
more pronounced than usual emphasis on the fate of individuals. What
is virtually universal is the acknowledgment of the challenge; whether
focusing on such broad questions as "how was it possible?" or the more
particular ones like "what was known?", historians adopt a certain
humility in their claims.
Indirectly, too, this humility is very much evident in the degree of
cooperation with other thinkers, representing often radically different
heuristic approaches. Philosophers, theologians and artists are given
equal, if not at times superior status as interpreters of the Holocaust.
Hannah Arendt, George Steiner, Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Richard
Rubenstein, Roy and Alice L. Eckardt-these are only some of the
nonhistorians that the historians have listened to most attentively. This
unprecedented degree of mutual cooperation, respect, and exchange of
ideas is, I believe, the best indication of how demanding is the task of
"understanding Auschwitz." The fact that not only disciplinary lines are
crossed, but those traditionally separating art from science, is a testimony
to the challenge, but also to the willingness to confront it.
I would not wish to overromanticize the endeavor. Intellectuals, being
human and greatly attached to their projects and ideas, are particularly
prone to petty squabbles. With careers and reputations at stake, debates
can become nasty or the system of mutual support too cosy. Those
working in Holocaust studies are not immune to such general pressures.
But, comparatively speaking, it is the spirit of cooperation that prevails.
And yes, there is the sense of awe towards the subject matter, a certain
added seriousness to the proceedings (at meetings and conferences, for
example). There is also the rather practical factor allowing for inquiries
to be largely unencumbered by personalized competition-the very
marginal status within respective disciplines. With some exceptions,
academics here cannot function as full-time Holocaust specialists; thus
32 Frames of Remembrance

they have more independence when pursuing interests in the area, and a
much less competitive position vis~a-vis their colleagues.
Judging by my own experience, and drawing on many talks with
others, I would like to add that treating one's work with Holocaust
materials as always a part and not the whole is frequently a conscious
individual choice, rather than institutional necessity. For reasons of
psychological hygiene, as it were, one wishes to be able to come and
leave. Looking into the abyss is emotionally demanding; there is the fear
of developing a certain fascination with the horrific on the one hand and
of becoming numb on the other. The option open to surgeons of rudely
joking about patients under their knife is not a possibility here. The best
one can do is to recognize one's own limits and act accordingly.
It is equally important, although harder in practice, to recognize the
limits among one's audience. If all memory workers dealing with
Holocaust materials face their own reluctance to be immersed in the
traumatic past, they draw strength from their very commitment to do the
work. Whatever the sources of such commitment, it is something deeply
felt and not easily disturbed; long leaves from the subject reflect rather
than weaken it. Among the people to whom the work is directed, however,
such is not the case. Beyond the relatively small .. community of
memory," 18 the obligation to remember the Holocaust very much needs
to be constructed along with the resources. Delving into traumatic
experiences of no personal relevance is not something we naturally or
willingly do. And indeed, for quite a long time, most North Americans
and many Europeans were not asked to.
Earlier in our discussion, I suggested that the problematics of remem-
bering the Holocaust implicate all of the basic questions, the whole
what/when/wherefhow nexus. It is time to focus on the subsidiary dyad,
as it were, the issues of who is to remember and why, issues which today
very much inform the search for the right ways to secure a public
presence for that memory.
For many years, the main goal of memory workers, scholars, writers,
artists, curators, has been to make remembering the Holocaust possible.
The task, as we have seen, proved very difficult, but if the search for the
right ways to remember continues, it has already allowed for the con-
struction of a rich memory base. There is a great deal of work still to be
done. At Auschwitz, for example, an international commission is current-
ly discussing major modifications to the structure of the museum exhibit,
 Ultimate Challenge 33

in response to serious criticisms from many quarters that the legacy of

Auschwitz cannot be found on the site itself.
In other places throughout the changed Central and Eastern Europe,
too, there are both local initiatives and international efforts to fill in the
void left by Communist regimes; "victims of Fascism," once the standard
phrase, gradually become Jews again. Beyond the physical restoration
of memory markers, there is a renewed effort at historical documentation,
now that many Soviet archives have been opened. We may also expect
more gathering of oral testimonies and more writings to emerge from the
area.
In other countries, too, the creation of basic records is not at all
complete. Yet while the work continues, and is likely to continue for quite
some time, its goals have been gradually redefined now to include
making remembrance of the Holocaust necessary. Most notably in the
United States, 19 where since 1985 a federal program has been in place to
sponsor and encourage state and local initiatives, memory of the
Holocaust would now be granted an altogether different public status.
From integration within school curricula to the construction of the
Holocaust Memorial Museum in the heart of Washington, D.C.,
Americans, especially young Americans, are now asked to remember. In
Canada, a parallel shift has occurred, though limited for now to the
educational sphere. The work here, too, is far from complete-and far
from unproblematic.
Some of the challenge is readily apparent. Teaching on the
Holocaust-in the classroom or in a museum-is a formidable task,
intellectually as well as emotionally. Educational solutions must be found
to problems persisting at the base, such as understanding and language.
Many a complexity may have to be lightly passed over for the sake of
pedagogical effectiveness. There are limits of time and space, necessitat-
ing choices at each stage of the process, choices which could easily distort
the overall "message." To go back to our example of defining heroism
and resistance, if a special teach-in for high school students consists of
a lecture by a Jewish partisan and a film about ghetto fighters, all under
the theme of "resistance," it is all too easy for them to leave, ignorant of
what the majority of Jews were doing to resist-which was to survive
with dignity, to retain a self. At the particular teach-in I attended recently
in Waterloo, Ontario, one of the educators involved tried to repair the
situation with a brief introductory comment on how meaningless are our
34 Frames of Remembrance

established concepts. The statement was clear to me, but I doubt it had
much resonance for the young people in the audience. It was not until
the second part of the day, when they met, in small groups, with survivors,
and could ask informal questions, that I sensed the program acquired
some meaning. For those young students, whose experience in life is so
distant from virtually all facets of the trauma in Nazi Europe, a survivor
provided the needed human connection.
Teachers very much recognize this need for bridging the distance.
Inviting survivors, or when that is not possible, reading their individual
testimonies appears a favored solution. 20 It works in so far as students
become capable of imagining themselves in the situations they discuss.
Self-examination is not the only goal of Holocaust education, but it is an
important component here. Facing up to one's own attitudes to the Other,
acknowledging the potential for good and evil in oneself, thinking
through many a moral dilemma-such are, broadly speaking, desired
results of the lessons.
The bridging that thus occurs is of a special universal-to-individual
quality. What disappears, and what calls for different strategies and
sensibility to reappear, is the in-between historical specificity. It is in this
area that most problems arise. It is one thing to speak of the Holocaust
as a distant reality that we can all learn from as humans, it is an altogether
different matter to speak of the Germans, Jews, Poles, Ukrainians,
Italians-and yes, Americans and Canadians. The desire to be faithful to
historical truth must now be balanced against measures of caution; at
issue is moral responsibility in the very concrete terms of one's people
or one's country; at issue, too, is the potential for generating conflict and
prejudice. The relevance to students' experience acquires a political
dimension. Canada's dismal record in accepting Jewish refugees from
Nazi Europe can easily become an argument in the dispute over current
immigration policies. The Arabs' sympathy for the Nazi cause might
enter the present Middle East conflict agenda, as could Holocaust echoes
in Israel. The struggle for independence in the Baltic republics-or
Croatia-may lose some of its appealing glow.
The list could continue on, but I think the point is made-remembering
the Holocaust is not politically neutral. And yet, there are compelling
reasons to make it so if it is to have a secure public presence in North
America, in and outside the classroom. A telling lesson here comes from
Canada, where during the mid-1980s, proposals for new legislation
 Ultimate Challenge 35

allowing for trials of war criminals sparked a serious clash between

(organized) Jewish and Ukrainian communitiesY Prior to the conflict,
activists from the two communities had just begun efforts to improve the
traditionally hostile relations; in the wake of a very public debate, those
efforts appeared doomed for some time to come. In letters to the editor,
many uninvolved Canadians expressed dismay at dwelling on historical
grievances in general, citing the dangerous developments in the
Sikh/Hindu relations as another case in point. A polity, the argument
went, whose citizens come from all comers of the globe cannot afford
any encouragement to the "old country" hatreds. Spelled out was a
principle usually well hidden in broad generalities-that remembering
the Holocaust ought not to interfere with the goals of ethnic harmony.
I live in Kitchener, Ontario, a city where many people are of German
origin, some quite recent. When Ernst Zundel, a West German immigrant
to Canada, went on trial in Toronto for publishing materials denying that
the Holocaust ever happened, the local newspaper became a forum for
expressing concerns with the possible damage to the image of Germans
as a whole. Interestingly, it was not Zundel's actions-and he had quite
an elaborate tough-man media personality as well-that troubled people;
the very exposure accorded to Auschwitz, day after day of the long trial,
did. One should add that within the Jewish community as well, voices
were heard objecting to this type of publicity; since the judge decided
then that the historical facticity of the Holocaust would be argued in court,
the deniers were seen as having won the battle no matter what the verdict.
Both sides believed the impact of the extensive media coverage would
be significant and, for different reasons, did not trust the journalists. As
it turns out, neither antisemitic nor anti-German attitudes received any
boosts from the trial, as revealed in later surveys. 22 But the concerns that
they might are not so easy to dismiss, as those concerns, whatever their
merit, influence also the future presence of the past.
The idea that, today, public discussion of the Holocaust may incite
rather than warn against antisemitism may at first appear as a case of
strange reasoning. Yet, in Canada at least, this was a widely shared
sentiment during the years which saw both the debates on war criminals
and successive trials of Zundel as well as another revisionistY In the
classroom setting, teachers too are aware that for at least some students
the question "why the Jews?" will draw in many below-the-surface
prejudices. To answer this question in the depth it deserves is difficult in
36 Frames of Remembrance

a newspaper or a course. And what makes the task especially problematic

is yet another dimension of dealing with the Holocaust in its full historical
specificity-the religious one. Here too, there may be compelling
reasons to minimize the impact of remembrance.
The challenge of Auschwitz is twofold. One is universal, the "where
was God?" Both Christian and Jewish theologians have struggled with
the answers; traces of the question are also to be found in much of
Holocaust literature and art in general. The other challenge is specific-
and directed to this worldly realm of Christianity. What was the role of
the churches, the dogma, the teachings in making the death sentence for
all Jews possible? The companion question is no less morally troubling-
what did Christians, as Christians, do to prevent the killings?
In an increasingly secularized public domain, including the education-
al system, it is possible to avoid discussing the fundamentals of belief.
What is not possible to avoid altogether, as long as the question "why the
Jews?" is posed, is the critical examination of the Christian heritage. And
this brings lessons of the Holocaust, inadvertently, into the center of
politically charged current debates about the proper place of that cultural
legacy. Teachers who may feel under. siege for wishing to preserve a
Christian presence in the classroom (in Ontario, policies of the public
schools explicitly prohibit it, for example) would have understandable
reluctance to dwell on what is essentially an indictment of Christianity.
We should add to this the ever-present potential for offending students'
sensibilities, and the relative scarcity of resources originating with the
Christian churches,24 all working against the full disclosure of the
religious dimension of the past. The strange idea that exposure to the
Holocaust could encourage antisemitism does not appear so strange any
more. Jews, after all, must have done something to provoke the wrath.
The building of bridges to the students' own experience that would be
historically specific is no less problematic in the secular domain. Beyond
specific political resonances we discussed above, there are the fundamen-
tal beliefs in progress and rationality implicated here. And not only are
the questions troubling, but they remain much more unsettled than others.
The assignment of responsibility for what happened to the Jews to
"modernity" is still debated, both in general terms and in the particulars.
The linkages between the Nazi project and antecedent ideas retain a
certain provisional quality, all the while more work is being done in this
area. For educators, what may be most immediately problematic is less
 Ultimate Challenge 37

the continuing debate than the implications of posing the questions at all.
In a society based on the idea of progress, and in the classrooms dedicated
to the dissemination of knowledge, to point out that the Holocaust might
not have been possible without both is demanding.
For some people, that challenge is precisely the reason why the
Holocaust should be studied, now also at the university level. Doctors-
or anthropologists-to-be-ought to learn what their knowledge could be
and was used for. Aspiring social engineers-and chemists-ought to
see the potential results of their efforts. In short, warning signs, if nothing
else, are called for within the academia.
So far, university curricula have proved rather resistant to such self-
questioning reflection,2 5 much more so, it seems, than those in the
seminaries. Speaking as a scholar, this disturbs me, yet I can also
appreciate the acute problems inherent in telling one's students not to
trust their teachers. At the same time, I would hope that with the general
shifts in public attitudes engendered by ecological concerns would come
greater readiness to face the responsibility of science through lessons of
the Holocaust as well.
The transition from memory-as-possibility to memory-as-necessity
raises, as we have seen, the issue of justification. In the North American
context, several options may be available and are indeed being tried out,
with a definite preference shown for universalizing the significance of
remembering the Holocaust. In other contexts, the options may be far
fewer, but the challenge of finding the "right" reasons to remember
remains.
Poland, which I studied most closely, illustrates the difficulties en-
countered in the wide zone of bystander communities where Jews had
been subject to persecution (as opposed to those in the free world). In the
country where so many of the European Jews perished, remembering the
Holocaust may at first appear not to need any justification. Such is not
the case, however. At stake are two distinct modes of remembering, each
requiring a different rationale. Mourning the Jews, in particular the Polish
Jews, calls for including them in the national family-and this means
reversing the principle of exclusion which had been in operation both
before, during and after the Holocaust. Learning from history, on the
other hand, calls for acceptance of large measures of collective respon-
sibility, something that Poles generally have been very reluctant to do.
For decades, memory of the Holocaust functioned, officially and unof-
38 Frames of Remembrance

ficially, as part of memory of Nazism, and thus very much together with
the memory of Polish victimization, effectively removing the issue of
responsibility. The prevailing view of the "Final Solution" as completely
accountable within the history of Germany served further to narrow the
potential lessons. Not seeing themselves implicated as Christians or as
Europeans allowed Poles to remember the Holocaust without reflecting
on it. And even today, when Poles are being asked to remember and to
reflect, the appeals rest on the direct, physical connection with
Auschwitz. The moral self-questioning which is called for, extending
over the whole of recent Polish-Jewish history, is presented as necessary
for national health, as it were. In this way, remembering the Holocaust
is justified as part of a larger effort to reevaluate Poland's relations with
minorities, we might add, a politically urgent effort in the new Europe.
The gradual shift from treating the Holocaust as one among many Nazi
crimes to recognizing its uniqueness might eventually lead to less
Poland-centered reflection. But in a country so directly implicated in that
history, it might indeed be still too early to dwell on issues of universal
significance. The moral accounting has only begun.
That remembering the Holocaust is also, if not prominently, a form of
moral accounting is a general proposition, of course, applying well
beyond Poland's borders. What the Polish case exemplifies perhaps
better than others, though, is the great difficulty of arriving at sound
criteria of judgment. Here too, the experience during those dark years
poses an immense challenge to our established order of things. Put
simply, not having been there weighs heavily on our ability to set the
moral parameters, almost to the point that we might resist the attempt
altogether.
Poland was the only European country where any action to aid Jews
was punishable by death; in the case of hiding a Jew, this meant death to
the whole family. Facing such severe consequences ought largely to
account, as many Polish writers have argued, for how few Jews were
actually saved, the other part of the explanation being the very physical
difficulty of providing refuge to some three million mostly unassimilated
Jews. The reasoning is plausible until one realizes that many other and
often rather mundane infractions were subject to the death penalty-the
smuggling of food, for example. And that despite the dangers, under-
ground activities of all kinds flourished.
 Ultimate Challenge 39

But if Poles disobeyed the Nazis in numerous ways, they did that with
the full societal approval and indeed encouragement. Such was not the
case as far as helping Jews was concerned; after the war, many of the
rescuers preferred to remain silent about their actions. Neither the civil
nor the church authorities appealed for or sanctioned aid to the Jews.
When the first organized effort began and such an appeal was issued,
most of Poland's Jews had already been killed.
This is not the place to draw this moral balance sheet in full, of course.
I only wish to illustrate some of the problems involved in apportioning
responsibility on the basis of "historical facts." To appreciate choices
which were available-and the choices actually made-one needs to
proceed through many a layer, from the well-documented laws of the
Nazi occupation all the way to the much less tangible realm of attitudes
and ideas. What compounds the difficulty is the very knowledge we
acquire in the process. It is all too easy-and I am now speaking in
general terms-to be guided by what we know when passing moral
judgments. Yet people who lived at the time operated within a necessarily
different set of parameters; what they "knew" is often hard to reconstruct
but we must try. Hindsight and contemporary sensibility, so important
for our understanding of the events, can prove serious obstacles to moral
accounting.
Beyond that challenge, which may be said to be part and parcel of any
historical inquiry, lie challenges unique to the Holocaust. The world of
camps and ghettos was not a "normal" one. For us to appreciate choices
confronting a man on work duty in the gas chambers of Treblinka is
ultimately impossible. Not knowing what it is like to be hungry for
months and years, do we have the licence to judge those who were?
As with many questions about remembering the Holocaust, this one
too remains open. For some people, including survivors, assessing ac-
tions of the victims in moral terms is itself indecent. For other people,
also including survivors, it is a compelling need if we are to learn from
the past. And again, the intuitively drawn lines become visible in public
debates, such as one sparked by Hannah Arendt's statements on the
victims' complicity. 26 Some of the memory shorthand, too, betrays
definite moral perspective-most prominently, the image of "sheep to
slaughter" -leading to critical reexamination of the assumptions we
hold. Overall, though, there is little consensus of how much moral
accounting should the victims be subject to-or on how to proceed.
40 Frames of Remembrance

The situation is clearly different, though no less problematic, as we

move to perpetrators and bystanders. It is different, since there is a wide
consensus on the need to draw balance sheets. Where the problems center
is in two areas. First, as exemplified here by the situation in Poland, there
is the complexity of issues involved. In the case of Germany, which may
initially appear to be a great deal more clear cut, the sheer quantity of
studies dealing with various sectors of society attests to the difficulties.
Compounding those difficulties is the often unacknowledged but no less
strong awareness of the present day implications of the analytical results.
As we mentioned earlier, memory of the Holocaust is not neutral. The
assessment of moral responsibility on the part of historical actors can
rarely be separated from contemporary realities. There is the very con-
crete continuity, let us say between the I. G. Farben company that
supplied Zyklon B gas to Auschwitz and the I. G. Farben today that,
somewhat manipulating the rules, builds new headquarters in Berlin. And
there is the symbolic continuity of both institutions and communities, the
continuity which forms the base for much debated claims of "collective
responsibility."
The elapse of time does make it easier to confront the morally
challenging past, yet it may also work to create a gap of relevance, as it
were. It is characteristic, for example, that among the people actively
involved in recent debates about the Holocaust, both in Germany and
Poland, most belonged to the generation of war children, a generation
with personal memories but also no direct responsibility. All the con-
tinuities notwithstanding, will the next generation care enough to remem-
ber? And if it remembers, will it be a troubling memory? Is it not possible
to morally neutralize the impact of Auschwitz?
Observing the recent developments in Germany, Austria, France,
Poland, I would argue this is not a theoretical concern. Where memory,
on moral grounds, is a necessity, it is also a burden. If completely to forget
may not be possible, finding ways to remember which least challenge
the collective self appears a thriving practice. 27 To come back to Berlin
for a moment, where a new museum of national history is under con-
struction, visitors there will be able to see the "Nazi room" as one among
many. Already a few years ago, German readers could find out that theirs
was not a radically different legacy in view of Stalin's crimes and the
continuing list of other mass atrocities in our times. They could read it
 Ultimate Challenge 41

in the press, as well as in a bestselling novel by a Polish writer who won

unprecedented acclaim in Germany. 28
As a line of moral reasoning, this one came under heavy attack, most
notably from Jurgen Habermas, provoking a long and heated debate. 29
My sympathies, as is likely already clear, are definitely with the critics.
Yet in an analytically crucial way, the linkages so formed between
Auschwitz and the gulag and Cambodia and ... ought not to be dismissed.
As I said at the outset of these reflections, for students of remembrance,
these traumas are linked in that they all challenge our capability to
construct memory. I see the challenge of Auschwitz as the ultimate one,
but the issues discussed here resonate on other memory terrains as well.
If I leave it up to the readers to hear such resonances, it is mainly in
recognition of my own limitations. To formulate meaningful questions
about the vicissitudes of remembrance requires, quite simply, a total
immersion in the specific histories, both of the events to be remembered
and the ensuing efforts.
The lesson I would like to conclude with here is rather a general one.
As students of remembrance, we continuously use critical standards
when analyzing how the job is done, often without much questioning of
our own tools. Looking closely at an area where the normative principles
are all open to dispute serves us a note of caution. We may be wrong,
wrong in thinking that we know what is the right way to remember. At
the very least, we ought to consider the possibility.

Notes

1. For the most comprehensive (and compact) survey of these questions, see Saul
Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final
Solution" (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
2. Rainer Kolmel, "A Holocaust Memorial in Berlin?" in Remembering for the Future:
Jews and Christians During and After the Holocaust (Oxford: Pergamon Press,
1988), 1755-67.
3. See Zev Garber and Bruce Zuckerman, "Why Do We Call the Holocaust "the
Holocaust"?: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Labels," in Remembering for the
Future: Jews and Christians During and After the Holocaust (Oxford: Pergamon
Press, 1988), 1879-92.
4. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone. The Holocaust in Literature (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1980) exemplifies this concern in respect to
literature. Han Avisar, Screening the Holocaust: Cinema :S Images of the
Unimaginable (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988)
treats the issue of filmic representation. Robert Skloot, The Darkness We Carry. The
Drama of the Holocaust (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988)
42 Frames of Remembrance

addresses the challenges specific to theater. (All three have been selected here for
their international comparative scope.)
5. For an extensive discussion, see Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay
on Kitsch and Death, translated from French by Thomas Weyr (New York: Harper
and Row, 1984).
6. Nechama Tee brought this issue to attention in "Altruism and Rescuing Jews," a
paper presented at the Annual Scholars' Conference on the Church Struggle and the
Holocaust, Philadelphia, March 1989. She continues research in this area.
7. Hanna Krall, Shielding The Flame: An Intimate Conversation with Dr. Marek
Edelman, The Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Gheno Uprising, translated by
Joanna Stasinska and Lawrence Weschler (New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1986).
8. Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (Glasgow: Fontana, 1987).
9. For a further discussion, see Judith E. Doneson, The Holocaust in American Film
(Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1987).
10. For the most extensive collection of papers addressing this issue, see Remembering
for the Future: Jews and Christians During and After the Holocaust, papers
presented at the International Scholars' Conference held in Oxford, July 10-13,
1988 (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988).
11. Reflections in Istvan Deak, "The Incomprehensible Holocaust," The New York
Review (September 28, 1989):63-72, exemplify this problem.
12. See Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide:
Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
13. For example, one of the most ambitious works here is Helen Fein, Accounting for
Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). As a comparative analysis, it is
valuable indeed. Yet as a basis for case-by-case historical inquiry and understanding
it represents a modest beginning.
14. See, especially, Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (New York:
Cornell University Press, 1989).
15. Michael M. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys,
1987).
16. Now published, Jacques Kornberg, "On Teaching the Holocaust as History," in
Montreal institute for Genocide Studies: Occasional Papers (Concordia University,
June 1991):1-11.
17. See, especially, Zev Garber, with Alan L. Berger and Richard Libowitz, eds.,
Methodology in the Academic Teaching of the Holocaust (Lanham and London:
University Press of America, 1988).
18. I am borrowing this term from Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M.
Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism
and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
For a further discussion, see ch. 3.
19. See Judith Miller, One, by One, by One. Facing the Holocaust (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1990).
20. This is based on several discussions at the Annual Scholars' Conferences on the
Church Struggle and the Holocaust.
21. For a full account, see Harold Troper and Morton Weinfeld, Old Wounds: Jews,
Ukrainians and the Hunt for Nazi War Criminals in Canada (Markham, Ont.:
Viking, 1988).
 Ultimate Challenge 43

22. See Gabriel Weimann and Conrad Winn, Hate on Trial: The Zundel Affair, the
Media, Public Opinion in Canada (New York: Mosaic Press, 1986).
23. See also Steve Mertl and John Ward, Keegstra: The Issues, The Trial, The Conse-
quences (Saskatoon, Sask.: Prairie Books, 1985).
24. I thank Roy and Alice L. Eckardt for many a discussion on these issues.
25. See, for example, reflections in Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under
the Nazis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
26. Hanna Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rev. ed.
(New York: Penguin Books, 1965).
27. For an excellent analysis of this process, see Alain Finkielkraut, Remembering in
Vain. The Klaus Barbie Trial & Crimes Against Humanity, translated by Roxamme
Lapidus with Sima Godfrey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
28. See Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, "Challenged to Respond-New Polish Novels About the
Holocaust," in Alan L. Berger, ed., Bearing Witness to the Holocaust 1939-1989
(Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), 273-83.
29. See Richard J. Evans, In Hitler s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt
to Escape from the Nazi Past (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989).
 PART II
Dynamics of Relevance
 3

Communities of Memory

The term "collective memory" accommodates a great variety of

territorial claims. At times, it is used to describe the heritage of the whole
of humanity, at times, it becomes a national property, at still other times
it is said to bond generations. For students of local and regional traditions,
the "collective" designates relatively small groups of people; for students
of the media, the "collective" could encompass a multinational audience.
Such vagueness, while understandable considering how open the concept
is, does pose analytical challenges. At issue is not only a methodological
confusion inherent in mixing different levels and types of inquiry; more
importantly, the apparent adaptability of "collective memory" to
whatever research circumstances may lead to glossing over some key
empirical questions about the relationship between private and public
remembrance. Thus as we justifiably pay more attention to how the past
is mediated, framed, represented, we may be assuming too much as to
the relevance of both that past and that mediation. In other words, as we
learn more about the practices and principles of memory work, we may
be leaving behind ordinary individuals who rather selectively attend to
the now rapidly growing and diversifying storehouse of public memories.
In an effort to remedy the situation, let us take the opposite path for a
while, and reflect on how the actors themselves come to draw boundaries
of sharing in remembrance of times past. What are the communities of
memory and how do they come into being? How do they matter, for those
within as well as on the outside?
In its most direct meaning, a community of memory is one created by
that very memory. For people to feel a sense of bonding with others solely
because of a shared experience, the experience itself would often be of
extraordinary if not traumatic quality. Soldiers who came back from the

47
48 Frames of Remembrance

trenches of World War I, veterans of the war in Vietnam, survivors of the

atomic bomb, escapees from Pol Pot's Cambodia, survivors of the
Holocaust-all these groups remained apart in their visceral, often
untranslatable memory of horror. The experience they shared could not
be truly shared with others, at least not at the same level of understanding.
And a sense of recognition, immediately apparent when survivors meet
each other is too of exceptional quality.
Viewers of Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth ofJuly, a film capturing
for the wide public what going to Vietnam and coming back were about,
would be very much made aware of the divide between "us" and "them."
In Japan, the language and social practice separated out those "tainted"
by the bomb. 1 Holocaust survivors, as their numbers are now declining,
express great anxiety about the approaching disappearance of authentic
witness, again stressing the abyss between those who were there and
those who were not.
What is "there," though? In the case of Holocaust survivors in par-
ticular, the community of memory appears to have constantly shifting
boundaries. For the very term "survivor," while in principle applicable
to any Jew who stayed alive until liberation, in the practice of
remembrance tends to focus, at times exclusively, on those who came
back from "l'univers concentrationnaire." 2 Within memory of the
Holocaust, Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka stand apart, as if in clear
recognition that the experience in the camps was unique among the
unique. At the same time, as more writers and artists of the "second
generation" work through the meanings of living with the memory of the
Holocaust, the community bonded by that memory grows to include all
the empathetic witnesses as well. The direct connection between ex-
perience and remembrance is now not severed, rather, it is redrawn to
capture the complexity of effects of that experience beyond individual
memories. 3
The shifting of community boundaries proceeds even further, though.
For as the Holocaust assumes a centrality in the reflections of some
prominent Christians, they too may be said to belong to that community
of memory. In a sense, the bonding initially created by living through a
trauma extends, with time, to those for whom remembrance of that
trauma acts as a key orienting force for their lives and public actions.
What underlies that bonding, though, or what defines the community
through its many transitions, is a shared, if not always explicated,
 Communities of Memory 49

meaning given to the experience itself. Thus if the invisible divide around
the survivors can never be fully bridged, remembrance which retains this
divide as one of its important structuring principles can allow for sur-
vivors to join others. 4 Personal relevance of the traumatic memory, and
not personal witness to the trauma, here defines the community.
That it is the meaning given to the event, rather than the event itself
which may create a community of memory is very much in evidence
when we consider the absence of remembrance on the part of key
witnesses to the destruction of European Jewry-the Poles. In theory,
people who lived around Auschwitz or Treblinka during their years of
operation, who could forever smell the stench of burning bodies, who
saw the trains return from the camps empty, in short, people who came
a lot closer to the abyss than anyone but the victims themselves, ought
to have had traumatic memories of what happened. Some do. But by and
large, the Polish witnesses and later, the Polish memory workers affecting
the public domain, never produced bonds of remembrance that would
reflect their experience of the Holocaust. Two reasons may account for
this, I think. First, for the majority of Poles, it is their own victimization
during the Nazi occupation that represented a formative trauma; indeed,
the prominent place accorded to both private and public remembrance of
the war's Polish victims and heroes continues to focalize national senti-
ments, now that the memory of Soviet occupations is reconstructed as
well. Secondly, the disappearance of the Jews, did not constitute a trauma
for Polish society, either at the time or in the decades that followed,
however abhorred were the means to achieve it. 5 If the Holocaust first
figured prominently within the Communist canon of public commemora-
tion, then to be appropriated as a Polish loss, none of this manipulatory
work held much relevance for the public at large. It is only recently that
Poland's opinion makers of various political persuasions, together with
a group of concerned youth, began to speak of the fate of Polish Jewry
as a loss. And this belated mourning, as it were, still preserves (with a
few exceptions) the nontraumatic quality of being witness by clearly
separating the "Final Solution" from the experience of the Poles. Defin-
ing the Holocaust as something that did not implicate the Poles themsel-
ves makes the event important, but not relevant.
That a community of memory cannot be artificially created by impos-
ing an "objectively" traumatic meaning on events subjectively ex-
perienced otherwise is perhaps best illustrated by the vicissitudes of
50 Frames of Remembrance

German memory of the Nazi era. The "unmasterable past" is only

unmasterable to those morally challenged by it, and feeling so challenged
by no means reflects the actual "weight" of one's actions. 6 As scholars
increasingly tum their attention to the role of specific sectors of society
in the overall success of the Nazi project, it also becomes increasingly
clear that remorse or even regret are rare among the direct participants.
The unanticipated depth and scope of reaction to the American series
Holocaust, shown on West German television in 1979,7 was a sharp
reminder of the failures of a long, concerted educational effort at expos-
ing the Nazi crimes. And the popularity of Heimat, a sixteen-hour
German series on memory of the past, produced in direct response to
Holocaust and excluding any traces of Auschwitz from its vision of the
past, is quite indicative of what the public would like privately to
remember. 8
At this point, it could be argued that perhaps expecting a community
of memory to form around a moral trauma is expecting too much from
ordinary humans. Indeed, it is often the victims of traumas who most
immediately and most "naturally" bond together. And yet, even within
the generally grim picture of normalizing Nazism, there are significant
counterforces to reckon with. The children of the Nazis, both literally
and metaphorically, often did ask questions. German filmmakers,
writers, and artists did produce works that troubled the national con-
science. The effort to reformulate German identity, especially as the West
and East unite, has been challenged by those keen on not burying the
past. A minority, yes, and quite unlike a community, the people of
conscience cannot be altogether ignored.
The even more convincing evidence to the potential of moral trauma
as a source of bonding comes from the United States. The experience of
soldiers in Vietnam as it is transmitted and translated for the public by
some of the most outspoken veterans cannot be reduced to its morally
troubling dimension. Yet neither can it bypass the moral terrain, both in
remembrance of actions in Vietnam and that of coming home. Based on
the life story of one veteran and made into a widely popular film by
another, the saga of the man "born on the Fourth of July" is a clear
illustration of how the two moral questions combine in the merging
public memory. The man was haunted by what he did in Vietnam; the
film is haunting in its presentation of the return to a rat-infested veterans'
hospital and to widespread hostility from the neighbours. It is true that
 Communities of Memory 51

the ..healing of America" that many see as having begun with the
unveiling of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington is more about
what Americans inflicted on each other rather than their actions in
Vietnam, but one ought to consider here the other image superimposing
itself on the memories of the war, the image of ..boat people." With time,
in other words, the moral charge of remembrance has not disappeared, it
acquired a great deal more complexity. With time, too, it is the second
generation which increasingly enters the community of memory while
searching for its own ethical answers.
As memory of this century's other great trauma -the Soviet gulag-is
gradually reconstructed, it becomes apparent that the communities of
memory emerging from ..there" are varied and often distanced from each
other. 9 Being a Ukrainian, a Pole, a Jew, a Russian-all victims-was
important during the life in the gulag and continues to be so in
remembrance. Bonds of solidarity that cut across ethnic lines have not
completely disappeared, but they have become exceptions to the general
rule of identifying with one's kin, then and later. At the same time,
writings from and about the gulag testify to the insidious dynamics of
totalitarianism rather than further inspiring a sense of national belonging;
remembrance is both a local project and a universal one, with clearly
defined political aims. Those who came back from the gulag, then, are
naturally reentering their old communities of memory, all the while
testifying to what is now openly acknowledged as centrally relevant to
the victim nations. In this way, the gulag experience finds its place within
collective memory of already bounded and bonded ethnic communities.
What still remains to be seen is how the moral challenge of the gulag and
Soviet-style rule in general can find its place in those memories without
radically disrupting the vision of unified civil society.
Such communities of memory bonded by traumatic experience do
often become absorbed by the wider national or ethnic collectivity. In the
process, their very presence might be enough to secure remembrance or
to redefine collective identity. Much more likely, though, it is through a
transition from unspoken bonding to outspoken (and frequently institu-
tionalized) activity that the community of memory acquires public
resonance. Many Holocaust survivors or Vietnam war veterans lead
strictly private lives, coping alone with their memories. But others,
especially as the years go by, find it essential to record their experience,
to create memorial markers for those who had died, to talk to the young,
52 Frames of Remembrance

to join groups or associations. In effect, they then create communities

tout court, engaged mainly (but not exclusively) in the work of
remembrance. Another form that this community involvement may
take-and equally important from the point of view of contributing to
public memory-is one of cooperation with established local organiza-
tions. If the spectacular success of veterans' efforts can be seen in the
impact of the Wall in Washington, the less nationally visible initiatives
count as well; the "small town America" is, after all, where healing may
be needed the most.
Survivors of the Holocaust are in an unique position in this regard,
since their local communities no longer exist. Faced with the impos-
sibility of return, survivors would join in with others who had emigrated
earlier from their towns and villages to create "Memorial Books." Over
500 of these books now exist, in North America, France, Argentina, and
Israel. Recalling the life as well as death of Jewish communities across
Eastern Europe, "Memorial Books" vary in their scholarly sophistication
or historical scope; they all serve as memory markers, a substitute for the
nearly nonexistent graves. 10
Recently, with the greater hospitality to Western (Jewish) visitors
throughout Eastern Europe, the work of remembrance has returned to its
more traditional forms, always, though, on a scale unable to match the
scope of destruction. Jewish graves are being found and restored,
memorial plaques attached to what once were thriving communal
centers, synagogues-turned-warehouses become historical landmarks.
The sacred grounds, even if only in small proportion, are rendered sacred
again. It remains to be seen, of course, whether such efforts translate into
remembrance on the part of the now locals; they have already, though,
helped in the grieving of the Jews themselves. 11
If traumas pose a special challenge to remembrance-and create
special bonds among those who were there-they are definitely not
unique in their power to generate a community of memory. Indeed, what
these tragic experiences share may be found in a variety of events devoid
of the ultimate encounters with death and evil, but still carrying enough
"formative force" to become the base for collective self-definition. There
is the element of great adversity, both to the human spirit and human
ingenuity; there are moral choices to be made, challenges to traditional
ways, often fear of the unknown. There is, in short, the intensity of human
drama in its many dimensions, the out-of-ordinariness of experience.
 Communities of Memory 53

And it does appear that such are indeed characteristics of those historical
events we have come to see as generational markers: great world wars,
the Depression, 1960s.
Generations too are communities of memory, even though theirs may
be a much more heterogeneous relation to the past, reflecting the diversity
of individual experience of key events. Numerically larger than any of
the survivor communities (indeed, often inclusive of those), generations
sharing in formative memory are also not "phenomenologically
separate" from others; however different their values and attitudes may
become from those of people coming after, full empathy is a possibility.
Generations so understood, it should be stressed, are not just "age
cohorts" sharing in the similar social circumstances at different stages of
their lives. Rather, they are comprised of people whose age may vary
widely, but who would all be strongly affected in their outlook by a
particular time in history. Children who grew up in the communes are as
much a part of the 1960s' generation as their then-young parents and
not-so-young college professors who took the side of rebellious youth.
With time, of course, what was once a formative experience may be
superseded by another or rendered irrelevant by individual life choices;
generations may grow, split up, shrink in size. For a community of
memory in flux, as it were, generation is an anchor, not a trap for
self-definition.
If traumatic, tragic experiences by their very nature engender a great
deal of memory work, both on the part of those who were there and those
concerned with securing remembrance, the formative drama that begets
a generation may live on by sheer force of the effect it had on individual
lives. This is not to say that public remembrance will not result-or not
matter-but only that even without articulation, through commemorative
ceremonies, for example, private memories acquire public relevance.
People who grew up during the Depression do not ordinarily set up
monuments to the hardships they had gone through. Rather, they tell
stories, and perhaps even more importantly, act on their then-acquired
view of life, work, and money.
Much has been written on the profound effect World War I had on
European cultures and mores. 12 To see that effect as confined to public
remembrance of the war itself would be to miss most of it. Precisely
because it was such a formative time, memory of the war did not have to
be directly evoked for it to remain relevant. The very strength of that
54 Frames of Remembrance

memory lies in its multifaceted "translation" into discourse about present

and future.
Generations, then, are not primarily communities of remembrance.
Shared memories are shared reference points, often not actively attended
to yet retaining their formative quality. Generations leave us more than
records of their experience or monuments to their heroes. They leave
changes in the cultural landscape.
Generations as communities of memory rarely become communities
tout court. Their size, internal diversity and often great geographical
spread, when added to the fact that the past informs but does not define
individuals' lives, make "generational institutionalization" highly un-
likely. When some form of group formation occurs, it would be on a much
smaller than generational scale, often springing from a sense of
camaraderie with people one became close to during the dramatic times.
Veterans of specific army formations or underground units active in
World War II did create an organizational framework for remembering.
Civilians did not.
Within their local communities, though, members of the same genera-
tion may indeed become socially separate even when not organized. The
notion of a "generation gap" aptly reflects what often happens when
values and attitudes clash. And the fact that intrageneration communica-
tion is frequently a great deal easier points again to the importance of
sharing tacit understandings of the past and present.
To complete this picture of communities of memory formed by
individuals with not only common experience but a shared sense of its
meaning and relevance, let us now consider the opposite end of the
sociological scale, as it were. A great deal of our daily interaction takes
place within various communities of memory allowing us the comfort of
feeling at home with people we are with. And even when we are not
actively attending to the shared memories, their very existence provides
for a sense of belonging we all seem to need. Indeed, without the sharing
of memories, it is difficult, if not impossible to conceive of social
bonding, on whatever a scale.
If collective memory is understood as we understand it here, not as a
collection of individual memories or some magically constructed reser-
voir of ideas and images, but rather as a socially articulated and socially
maintained "reality of the past," then it also makes sense to look at the
most basic and accessible means for memory articulation and main-
 Communities of Memory 55

tenance-talk. 13 Family dinners and gatherings for special occasions are

a prime time for the construction, reconstruction, and repair of familial
memory; a guest who is a stranger, no matter how welcome would he be
made to feel, ends up left out. And if that guest is not to remain a guest,
he needs to patiently sit through the old stories until he too can be a part
of the new ones. A new worker joining a company team will too be
immediately treated to institutional tales, but cannot join the "com-
munity" until there be tales involving his own mishaps and successes.
These communities of memory often outlive the actual sharing of
experience; one need only think of class reunions. Living separate lives,
the once-friends may no longer share anything but their memories, and
there are times when this proves insufficient to counter the differences
of the present. Often enough, though, a brief exchange of favorite old
stories brings back the bonds, however altered by the passage of time.
Photographs, home movies and songs from the past all help in the
process, as would a return to the original physical environment.
Class reunions or visits with friends from times long gone can be very
disappointing, of course. Bonds of shared experience, when such ex-
perience is ordinary, are often fragile. People's priorities and ways of
making sense of the past change, so that talking may become a confir-
mation of separation rather than a maintenance job. Not validated,
individual memory recedes, if not disappears altogether.
Do such small and fragile communities of memory matter in the
overall picture of the dynamics of remembrance? Would not their im-
mersion in the ordinary, everyday happenings make them potentially
irrelevant to the realm of public discourse? After all, families, school
buddies or work colleagues rarely go public with their stories, unless they
already are public with their lives. And yet, precisely because theirs are
private memories, with high degree of significance for the everyday
living, these memories can and often do preempt the publicly articulated
ones. 14 In Germany, for example, it is very much on the home front that
a positive, even nostalgic picture of the Nazi era could be preserved. At
the very least and most common, the "reality of the past" constructed in
the individual's immediate circles would be providing the key base line
for the reception of, indeed, receptivity to the socially sanctioned offer-
ings. At its strongest, the private maintenance of remembrance may
directly counter the officially given version of the past; the now explosive
"recovery of memory" in the once-Communist countries is but one
56 Frames of Remembrance

testimony to how familial stories can successfully resist ideological

encroachments. 15
The significance of such small communities of memory is not limited,
one should add, to the realm of recent, directly experienced past. Al-
though stories told by participants and witnesses to the events may carry
more vibrancy and detail, families especially are also actively preserving
memories of times and people long gone. In Poland, for example, the
longing for independence survived, despite all the official manipulation,
largely because so many families could talk about and remember strug-
gles going back to the nineteenth, if not the eighteenth century.
Added to such direct ways that the contents of privately constructed
memory may have an impact on the receiving of public offerings should
be now the more subtle and pervasive influences on the individual's value
system in general. Just as the members of a generational group need not
actively attend to their formative past for that past to "live on," families
or friends too may act on the principles embedded in their shared stories
without constantly re-telling them. And these principles C'do not trust the
government" being but one example) contribute a great deal to how
people attend to and interpret public discourse, that about the past
included.
Not enough is empirically known about the dialectics of mediated,
framed remembrance and that maintained in the relatively private
spheres. And just as students of popular culture argue vehemently about
its impact on people, it may take a long time before there develops an
analytical agreement on the dynamics of collective memory. What the
work already done shows is that neither "the past" nor remembrance of
it can be deduced from public discourse alone. The "realities of the past"
as they pertain to individuals are not carbon copies of publicly available
accounts. They are often worked out within smaller and larger com-
munities of memory, their shape and texture reflecting a complex mixture
of history and biography. In other words, how people attend to the past,
if at all, and how they make sense of it is very much grounded in their
experience. At the same time, and allowing for this, the public framing
of remembrance does matter. Beyond providing resources to work with,
public discourse may validate (or discourage) particular ways of seeing
the past. 16 It may also create an altogether new community of memory,
where bonding extends well beyond individuals' own experience.
 Communities of Memory 57

All the communities of memory we discussed so far are natural, in a

sense that they come into existence through people's sharing in living
through events as well as the telling. Collective memory, though, is not
reducible to such immediacy of links with the past. Often, it is the telling
itself, the ongoing articulation of the "reality of the past" that forms and
informs a community. For that matter, the past so told need not be real at
all to offer the basis for communal solidarity. All that is needed is active
remembrance, communally shared and deemed important for the
community's self-defmition. Rituals and the structuring of a yearly cycle
serve that function very well.
In both the Jewish and the Christian tradition, collective memory of
the key "events" of religious significance is built into the observance of
festivals, into the prayers, into the calendar itself. The Jews are indeed
often referred to as a "people of memory," 17 since virtually all of their
holidays are commemorative ones, referring to events at very different
historical distance in a unified yearly series of ritual (and stories). It was
only in the nineteenth century that "Jewish history" as such became a
legitimate subject of inquiry for Jews. And even at its most modem and
secular, Jewish self-definition is heavily referenced by remembrance-
of the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel. 18 Some of what
is yearly commemorated did happen (for example, the destruction of
Jerusalem Temple), some has to be accepted on faith by believers. But
to its very core, this is a community of memory which has managed to
survive for centuries because of it.
Both the perennial modem debate around the question of "who is a
Jew?" and the varied answers offered by Jews reflecting on their identity
point to an increasing importance of sharing in memory obligations, if
not in memory itself. The displacement of religious observance from the
center of the Jews' lives often results in granting remembrance an ever
more sacred status. Seen in this light, the outrage felt by some Jews at
other Jews' "betrayal" that follows breaking the community ranks (espe-
cially in North America) is perhaps the best indication of sentiments
involved in what may appear as ideological squabbles. And the ease with
which the past comes to be invoked as justification for problematic
decisions in the present (especially in Israel) testifies to the continuing
significance of memory for the community.
If the case of the Jews is perhaps the most dramatic evidence to the
strengths of collective memory, it is also highly instructive as to the
58 Frames of Remembrance

mythical structure needed when remembrance is to sustain a people.

There is the "myth of the origin," something that anthropologists have
uncovered in virtually all human societies. There are heroes, who provide
the essential exemplars of core moral beliefs. There is the highly selective
memory of outside forces affecting the people's fate. And, perhaps most
importantly, there is the narrative of shared suffering, greatly strengthen-
ing the sense of moral obligation to the communal past.
Collective identity does not have to rest on a narrative of victimization,
of course. The "glorious past," when such exists, carries its own appeal.
Yet history supplies us with some very convincing examples of the
rallying power inherent in a shared memory of oppression, power not
matched by that of success stories. Indeed, for remembrance of victories
and progress to be meaningful at all, it must contain its own "dark"
reference points. A mixed narrative, then, is needed even under the best
of circumstances.
If we look at this century's two most cruel regimes-Nazi Germany
and Stalinist Russia-for all the differences between them, we may be
struck by the parallels in their uses of publicly manufactured memory.
At the very center, there are stories of extreme victimization: Germany's
losses in World War I and the injustice of the Versailles Treaty, 19 the
post-Revolutionary war in Russia and then, the Great War's tremendous
hardships. Both employ the figure of a savior: Hitler and Stalin. Where
they part is at the point of introducing elements of glory; for the Nazis,
references to the mythical past structured the mythical future; in the
Stalinist vision, the bright future had to hold on its ideological own. The
key similarity, though, is in how these narratives actually worked in social
practice. Beyond "true believers" who might have indeed adopted the
whole package, ordinary men and women identified primarily with the
victimization story, all the more so for the strong biographical connec-
tion. 20 There is a troubling lesson here, a lesson well learned by those
mobilizing small and large communities for action: nothing may serve
the purpose of solidarity better than living memory of suffering at the
hands of.... And how this " .... " is filled depends more often than not
on politically and ideologically driven choices, where mythmaking can
be at its strongest; one need only to think of the Nazi image of the Jew.
Once the suffering recedes further into the past, beyond the immediate
experience of community members, the need for active memory work
clearly increases. But whether sustained by privately told stories or solely
 Communities of Memory 59

by public remembrance, the narrative of victimization has to be first

plausible to the individuals called upon. That this is not always easily
attainable, especially when the community of memory is being created
anew, as it were, may best be seen in the history of large and international
social movements in this century: the workers' and women's. Again, for
all the differences between them-and for the great ideological diversity
within both-they have shared the broad promise of liberation from
oppression, and the considerable difficulties of making the promise
appealing to their constituents. The challenge has been twofold; first,
people need to accept that their lives are indeed defined by their being
workers or women, and then, they need to adopt the narrative of oppres-
sion and liberation as their own. On both counts, individuals' loyalty to
other, more natural communities may prevent their accommodation of
the movement's claims. And on both counts, efforts must be made,
through inquiring, writing, and telling, to provide the prospective mem-
bers with varied and moving stories, exemplifying the struggle. Beyond
that, there is the needed work on remembrance proper: the choice of
rallying dates for ceremonial observance of the movement's values and
goals, the attending to one's heroic figures, commemorating of key
victories and defeats. (The appropriation of this symbolic activity by the
"workers' state" should not obscure its more natural dynamics here.)
In neither case, producing a stock of shared memories is in and of itself
sufficient to secure members' loyalty; the vision ofliberation and equality
carries its own heavy responsibility. Yet without an articulation of the
past, first of oppression, then of the struggle, full identification with the
movement would be impossible to achieve. That it is often so difficult to
achieve, beyond the relatively small core of activists, need not reflect the
weaknesses of the constructed narratives. Rather, it is reflective of the
strengths inherent in the smaller, older, and personally relevant com-
munities of memory.
Framing an experience as that of oppression is, of course, greatly
helped if there already exists a shared sense of trauma or suffering.
Indeed, when we think of the notion of "victimization," the two elements
appear inseparable. A closer look, though, allows for recognition that two
quite different dynamics of remembrance are at work here. Japanese
Canadians, interned, relocated, and stripped of property during World
War II, shared for many years a near silent memory of their suffering. It
took the efforts of their children and grandchildren, imbued with the very
60 Frames of Remembrance

Canadian (and recent) ideas about citizens' rights, to define the war
experience as one of injustice and government-sanctioned oppression,
and to demand apology and retribution. 21 It is as if suffering itself
survives as a visceral memory, while its explanation, still deeply felt, is
more a result of ideological work, the work of framing remembrance in
categories of victim/oppressor. For the people involved, what they went
through is all too real, but it is also open to changes in definition.
We have already seen how such openness can be exploited for vicious
political purposes (the Nazi idea of the Jew); we should perhaps accept
that even in its benign forms, designating the oppressor carries exploitive
potential. There is indeed only a fine line, often crossed in political
arguments, between sombre remembrance of the victims and capitalizing
on the emotional charge of memory for immediate communal returns.
Across Central Europe and in the former Soviet Union, it might be
impossible for some time to come to separate commemoration of the
regimes' victims from the ongoing political manoeuvring. Memory of
the Holocaust, for all its inherent resistance to simplification (as this is
an event many see as defying explanation), has been used and is likely
to continue being used to score smaller and larger political points. As
morally troubling as this exploitation of human suffering is, it also attests
to the awesome powers of memory in the maintenance of communal
solidarity as well as spear-heading communal action.
If the memory of victimization can so well serve the cause of com-
munal unity, it is not only because of its particular emotional strength.
Structurally as well, the self-definition as a victim clearly marks the
boundary between "us" and "them" in ways only matched by ties of
kinship. To construct a sense of community, one almost inevitably needs
the presence of the Other; the oppressor serves this role very well indeed.
It is no coincidence that the radical segment of the feminist movement is
the one most resembling a community tout court, for it is also the one
clearly identifying men as the (enemy) Other. In many parts of the world,
intensification of ethnic warfare follows a redrawing of boundaries
according to narratives of victimization; 22 there the two bonding forces
cross and combine in politically complex scenarios. It is certainly sad-
dening, if not tragic, that we humans persist in acutely dividing "us" from
"them"; for students of collective memory, it is also imperative that we
understand the resources drawn upon in this process.
 Communities of Memory 61

In most countries today, the state borders do not define the boundaries
between "us" and "them." Ethnically and culturally homogeneous states
are a rarity, and even when few minorities are present, regional divisions
still matter. Nationalist dreams notwithstanding, the citizens' loyalty to
the state cannot thus rely on their membership in a community of
memory; indeed, such membership often poses a challenge to state unity.
At the same time, without some form of a common historical narrative
(together with all the patriotic symbolism it entails), the state cannot
achieve legitimacy as a political entityY Added to that is the challenge
of accommodation to the historical shifts in the country's borders and
thus also power and population. In the Western world, recent decades
have further complicated the situation with the continuous influx of
immigrants (and illegals) from Asia, Africa, South and Central America,
all putting into question the established visions of society.
Drawing on the experience in Canada, a relatively young country, but
also one where the increasing diversity translated into state policies of
multiculturalism (back in 1971), can be instructive here. 24 Canadians, so
it seems, have had a permanent "identity crisis." French Canadians, most
of whom live in Quebec, have progressively moved toward a self-defini-
tion as "Quebecois," a distinct society within both Canada and North
America, bounded by language and history. English Canadians, on the
other hand, tend to articulate their difference in terms of the Other-the
United States-and in narratives of social values rather than historical
experience. Often referred to as "two solitudes," English and French
Canada struggle politically as well as symbolically to maintain a unified
front.
The official policy of bilingualism, often challenged on both sides,
was to reflect the idea of different-but-equal Canadians, or rather the
presence of two founding peoples. But then, shortly after that vision was
put into administrative practice, another one emerged-that of multicul-
turalism. Now all the ethnic groups within Canada were to be respected,
if not encouraged, in their differences. Advocated as both a necessity (in
face of increasingly non-European immigration) and a form of "enrich-
ment program" for the country, multiculturalism gradually earned in
political stature. At the end of the 1980s, the idea was indeed accepted
by the majority of Canadians. Constitutional debates of that period
showed, though, that the practice of multiculturalism may be another
matter altogether. First, its incompatibility with the older French-plus-
62 Frames of Remembrance

English formula became rather apparent, especially in Quebec which was

not yet ready to dilute its hard-won Frenchness. Then, more and more
questions were publicly raised about the limits to tolerance, be it of
bullfighting or of traditional Sikh garb. Finally, the policy came under
much sharper scrutiny from social scientists, recognizing the immense
conflict potential built into the vague definition of "cultural."
As long as multiculturalism appeared contained in colorful ethnic
festivals and culinary delights of Toronto or Vancouver, the idea of
"Canada" appeared safe. But when it began to be taken politically
seriously by various ethnic communities of memory and translated into
claims of historical justice, both vis-a-vis Canada and the old world Other
(by Ukrainians and Jews, for example), the frail base for future Canadian
unity emerged in sharp outline.
It is true that many of the ethnic groups in Canada today have had no
contact with each other prior to their arrival there; when disputes arise,
these are then rooted in cultural differences alone. But a significant
portion of the "Canadian mosaic" is made up of peoples who did have
(some still do) turbulent experience together, where mutual hostility and
apprehension became interwoven in the fabric of their collective
memories. 25 And if the vision of equality to which they are now asked to
adhere provides a theoretical end to animosities, the encouragement to
retain ethnic culture may be spelling the exact opposite. An unhyphenated
Canadian historical narrative may simply prove too weak in competition
with communal traditions (especially, once again, when these rest on a
vision of victimization).
If Canada can be seen as an unique social laboratory for working out
the balance between the useful and the damaging 26 collective memory,
it is also an illuminating example of the more universal trends in the
formation of communities of memory, away from strictly ethnic ties.
Canada is a vast country, but like many smaller ones, it is a country of
regions. Some of these regions are certified political entities, with con-
siderable powers (the provinces), others retain separate character both
physically, sociologically and symbolically (Northern Ontario, for ex-
ample). Regional identity, as any dispute shows, is strong. It reflects
differences in the landscape, way of life and, yes, the ethnic composition
as well. As such, it has more of an everyday relevance to people. It is a
heritage of manageable size, as it were. And the symbolic fabric of that
regional heritage is much closer at hand than "Canadianism." Historical
 Communities of Memory 63

landmarks (which in the Canadian context means dating back fifty years
or more) are now increasingly recognized as needing preservation; urban
planners are asked to respect the original character of spaces. The days
of unfettered growth appear to be gone. Artifacts from the past find their
place in local museums-and living rooms. Local traditions are being
revived, at times reinvented. The emphasis is on tangible reminders of
the past and their integration into the rapidly changing presentP In short,
in the wake of modernization, with all the accompanying uprootedness,
there is a concerted effort to restore and maintain both local (of a town)
and regional traditions. In the process, new inhabitants are welcome to
share in-but not transform-the older community of memory.
Whether the Canadian experiment at accommodating the whole broad
range of loyalties and cultural anchors succeeds, it is too early to tell. On
the one hand, if we were to draw lessons from many centuries of
European history, a locally based communal identity appears not only
sustainable but also open to multiethnic membership. Not to idealize the
picture, since tensions and conflicts along religious and ethnic lines were
indeed common, the pre-1918 "middle Europe" in particular exemplifies
how the attachments to geographically small and culturally mixed
"home"-be it Vienna or Vilno-can be a viable option. On the other
hand, though, what we have seen in many comers of Europe in recent
years points to a tremendous rallying force of arguments for ethnic purity.
The violence in ex-Yugoslavia, the disenfranchisement of minorities in
the Baltic republics, and the calls for redrawing of borders issued by
Hungarian nationalists are but some testimony to the fragility of local
communal bonds. And the fact that so many of the advocates for a new
order of solidarity evoke what might be called "racial" memories, often
jointly with stories of victimization, sadly confirms our earlier observa-
tions as to the power inherent in such appeals. When seen from Sarajevo,
the challenges facing Canadians obviously pale in comparison. Yet both
here and there, and, one might add, in the United States as well as Western
Europe, the stakes may be remarkably similar-and high. Will the
peoples' sense of a shared past be used to create inclusive and manage-
able political entities? Or, will the varied communities of memory
become exclusionary, strife generating, and ultimately irreconcilable
detractors from any possibility of societal peace?
These are, admittedly, "big" questions. As students of the dynamics
of collective memory, we may be best advised to stay with the smaller
64 Frames of Remembrance

ones. The very complexity of the patterns we have found within the
experience/community/identity nexus, the great variation in ways in
which communities of memory are constructed and maintained, and
finally, the different weight these processes carry in social and political
life, all point to the need for scaling down the inquiry. And yet, it is those
'big' questions which remind us of the priorities on the analytical agenda.
The bonds that collective memory can create as well as those it can
destroy are more than a matter of definitions.

Notes

l. In part, the reaction was guided by the very human fear of the unknown effects of
radiation; see Robert Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (New York:
Basic Books, 1968).
2. For a further discussion of this problematic, see Emanuel Tanay, "On Being a
Survivor," in Alan L. Berger, ed., Bearing Witness To The Holocaust 1939-1989
(Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), 17-3!.
3. See, especially, Alan L. Berger, "Bearing Witness: Second Generation Literature of
the Shoah," in Modern Judaism 10, 1 (Feb. !990):43-63.
4. A compelling account of this dynamic may be found in Lawrence L. Langer,
Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1991).
5. On this point, see also Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, "Poland, After the Holocaust," in
Remembering for the Future: Jews and Christians During and After the Holocaust
(Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988), 143-55.
6. See, for example, Peter Sichrovsky, Bam Guilty: Children of Nazi Families,
translated from German by Jean Steinberg (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
7. See Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes, eds., Germans & Jews Since the Holocaust:
The Changing Situation in West Germany (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers,
1986).
8. For a study of Heimat in the broader context of West Gennan cinema, see Anton
Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of Hisrory as Film (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1989).
9. The following section relies on materials found in several Polish periodicals. I am
also indebted to John Jaworsky for sharing his findings on the national identification
among prisoners of the gulag.
10. See Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin, eds. and trans., From a Ruined Garden:
The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry (New York: Schocken Books, 1983); Annette
Wieviorka and Itzhok Niborski, Les livres du souvenir: Memoriauxjuifs de Pologne
(Paris: Editions GallimardfJulliard, 1983).
11. From my discussions with a number of survivors who had visited Poland in the last
few years, often bringing along their children, it seems the very voyage has a sacred
quality. This theme also appears in Jack Kugelmass, "The Rites of the Tribe:
American Jewish Tourism in Poland," in Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kramer, and
Steven D. Lavine, eds., Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture
(Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992).
 Communities of Memory 65

12. See, especially, Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York and
London: Oxford University Press, 1975) and Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The
Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys,
1989).
13. For a good discussion of the dynamics of reminiscing, see Edward S. Casey,
Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1987).
14. Empirically rich studies of the private/public interplay may be found in Raphael
Samuel and Paul Thompson, eels., The Myths We Live By (London and New York:
Routledge, 1990).
15. Not all stories here are of success. See Alain Brossat, Sonia Combe, Jean-Yves Potel,
Jean-Charles Szurek, eds., A l'Est, la memoire retrouvee (Paris: Editions Ia
Decouverte, 1990).
16. For an interesting (autobiographical) analysis of the complexities at play, see Alain
Finkielkraut, Le Juif imaginaire (Paris: Seuil, 1980).
17. See, especially, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish
Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982).
18. Fora critical view, see Jacob Neusner, Stranger at Home: "The Holocaust, "Zionism
and American Judaism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981).
19. For in-depth discussion see George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the
Memory ofthe World Wars (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
20. See Bronislaw Baczko, Les lmaginaires Sociaux: Memoirs et espoirs collectifs
(Paris: Payot, 1984).
21. H. David Kirk, "Acculturation and Protest among Canadians and Americans of
Japanese Ancestry: A Note on the 'Loyalty of Disloyalty,"' paper presented at CSAA
meetings, Winnipeg, June 1986.
22. See Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1985).
23. See, especially, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1983).
24. The following section draws on a senior seminar on multiculturalism, held in
1991/92; I thank my students for their valuable input. A research project in this area,
although not carried on to completion, provided me with insights as to the "politics
of science."
25. To take but one example: among the most recent immigrants who settled in Toronto,
there are large numbers of Caribbean blacks, Southeast Asians, and Poles. For the
latter, this is their first real exposure to people of different skin color (Poland being
a racially homogeneous country). Yet when the same Poles encounter Toronto's
Jews or Ukrainians, the past matters.
26. At stake, as well, is the very defmition of "useful" versus "damaging"-a highly
politicized terrain.
27. On this dynamic in the United States, see Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of
Memory: The Transformation ofTradition in American Culture (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1991).
 4

Conflicts

In its common usage, the expression "collective memory" suggests a

consensus. And yet, the social construction of "realities of the past" is
frequently a site of intense conflict and debate. Would this mean we are
stuck with a concept that is analytically misleading so much of the time?
I think not, as long as we recognize that the consensus implied in the
name is the ideal that memory workers aspire to and willingly struggle
for, especially under adverse circumstances. Collective memory is not a
given, not a "natural" result of historical experience. It is a product of a
great deal of work by large numbers of people, all securing (mostly)
public articulation for the past. For this reason alone, we should not be
surprised to see differences of perspective and opinion as well as sharp,
principled disagreements. But of course there is more to the story.
Collective memory is a precious resource, after all, for maintaining social
bonds and claiming authority, for mobilizing action and legitimating it.
Indeed, it is one of the most important symbolic resources we have,
imbued as it often is with quasi-sacred meanings and capable of evoking
very powerful emotions. If, in many social contexts, collective memory
appears underemployed, as it were, this should not prevent us from
acknowledging its potential force. And one of the best ways to appreciate
what that force is, is to look closely at the dynamics of conflict.
In this book, I frequently treat debates about the past or about
remembrance as especially rich reservoirs of data, with their high degree
of articulation of different framing principles making for analytically
easy access. Here, our task will be to go beyond this admittedly pragmatic
approach as we raise questions about the texture of conflict itself. We
would still be learning from instances of conflict, but this time, we are
also interested in learning about them. And, in keeping with such a shift

67
68 Frames of Remembrance

of focus, we would now be looking at memory-as-a-contested-terrain in

many of its different forms, where sharply articulate debates occupy only
a portion of the overall picture. The open, public and, one should add,
recorded disagreements retain their utility value, but are now made to
acquire specificity vis-a-vis other expressions of conflict.
In both social and analytical practice, the loud debates appear to
function primarily as "tips of the iceberg." When protesters gather in
front of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, incensed by what they
see as a racist portrayal of Africans, at issue is as much the exhibit itself
as the long-felt oppression by the white society. 1 The public display
becomes an occasion for speaking about problems well beyond memory.
And the significance of the debate is not lost on the participants-or
observers.
Why "Into the Heart of Africa" triggered such an intense controversy
is an empirical question; aside from the qualities of the exhibit, we would
need to know more about the people and institutions involved. There is
no inevitability of conflict, I would argue, or no easy way to predict that
this rather than that memory production will serve as a site for articulation
of opposite views. At times, when the producers themselves frame their
work as "controversial," we may somewhat safely assume that a debate
would result; there are no guarantees, though. At times, it is the symbolic
importance of the work that generates or at least intensifies the debate;
the construction of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington might be
a case in point. But again, not all major memory markers are subject to
such controversies; the Vietnam War Memorial in New York, to pursue
our example, was built entirely on consensus. 2 The ability to capture
public attention, especially in this media-saturated world, matters. And
so does the availability of other channels for discussion of what are often
very complex issues; under the Communist regimes, which did not look
favorably, to say the least, at any questioning of the system, debates about
an otherwise obscure historical novel would often serve as a substitute
for the real thing.
To say that memory disputes happen when something hits a sensitive
public nerve may be part of the explanation; however, most of the time,
we only know this after the fact. The recent controversy over the
symbolism at the site of Auschwitz is highly instructive here. 3 The key
word is "recent," for while occasional criticisms have been voiced by
Jewish observers over a long period of time, 4 it was only in 1987 that
 Conflicts 69

concerted, organized, institutional effort began, aiming to rectify the

absence of Jewish memory at Auschwitz. The Polish side, especially the
Catholic Church officials, were perhaps understandably baffled. Not only
did they not appreciate what "Auschwitz" meant to Jews, at the more
immediate level they simply could not comprehend why they were now
taken to task. In other words, the raw nerve which was clearly struck by
the presence of a convent and a large cross should have been so struck
long ago, they reasoned. And indeed, "objectively speaking," the timing
of the dispute remains a puzzle. It is very likely that what ultimately
prompted the vocal reaction was the few Jewish activists who took this
matter to be their high priority. What we are left with, analytically, is the
troubling "human factor."
Because memory disputes implicate big issues and often high social
as well as political stakes, when they are subjected to analytical scrutiny,
the focus is on substantive matters at hand. To further our understanding
of the dynamics of collective memory, it would also be important to
explore their more "formal" qualities. If we cannot, with any degree of
accuracy, predict the onset of disputes, we might be better equipped to
account for their staying power. The work that ~oes into maintenance of
conflict on the public agenda, the work of articulation through organiza-
tion and media channels, these are perfectly amenable to sociological
questioning. 5 And one of the advantages of posing such questions as who
does what, where and when is that we may gain the much needed
corrective as to the social significance of the dispute itself. There is no
doubt, for example, that the issues of German identity and history
addressed during the mid-1980s in a very public dispute among West
German intellectuals were of key philosophical importance. And we can
learn a great deal from these polemics, not only about each participant's
position but more broadly about the predicaments facing German society
as a whole. 6 Yet whether this dispute had any impact beyond the rather
narrow circle of intellectuals, we do not know. It was conducted in the
popular magazines, which would suggest some degree of relevance for
the educated readers. A few years later, though, when the two Germanies
united and the whole question of national identity returned, it was as if
the earlier debates had left only weak traces. When confronted with the
increasingly violent attacks against foreigners, with all their Nazi echoes,
public opinion leaders would appeal for calm in a language of the nation's
70 Frames of Remembrance

reputation. Mostly missing was the reflection on the now dual legacy of
Hitler and Communism. 7
It may well be that as students of public discourse, justifiably attracted
to memory disputes as occasions for articulating ideas about the past, we
are prone to see such articulation as more socially important than it
actually is. The written work, after all, remains our most valuable guide
to thoughts and feelings; we justifiably pay attention when we are given
a chance to examine what would otherwise be hidden from us. And those
writing the words clearly believe they matter. When controversy ensues,
there is an ever greater sense that the writings matter; arguments, respon-
ses, claims, counterclaims, when printed for many to read, amplify this
perception with each new item appearing. The issues in dispute become
more and more complex, the analysis becomes more and more challeng-
ing. It is natural then to feel that the task is done once the difficult
interpretive procedure is over, once we have explicated the various
positions and connected them to larger philosophical or ideological
patterns. It is not natural, I would suggest, then to question the relevance
of the exercise. And yet question we must, if what we aim to understand
are the dynamics of collective memory. The public disputes, more often
than not, challenge the established wisdom, by critically exposing it as
well as crystallizing the alternatives. As such, they have the potential to
change the existing ways of remembrance; indeed, changing people's
views is often an explicit goal of the participants themselves. An analysis
that stays strictly within the realm of ideas can tell us what is being
disturbed and how, but it cannot gauge the extent of change. For this, we
need to tum our attention to the wider social context in which the debate
is taking place. We also might have to wait and reexamine the state of
affairs a year or two or more after the public confrontation. All along the
way, we would be looking for signs of either a shift in the ways of
remembrance or of the more likely continuing if now diffused presence
of conflict. In short, although memory disputes occur within a limited
span of time, the analysis of their significance calls for a longitudinal,
historical approach.
Such an approach is ever more necessary when the conflict itself is of
a long duration. Just as we learn the most about ways of remembrance
from the empirically grounded "histories of memory," we cannot under-
stand the dynamics of conflict without the "thick descriptions" offered
by the case studies. At the current stage of analytical endeavors, it is too
 Conflicts 71

early to formulate many highly general rules. Rather, what I will aim for
in the remainder of this chapter is a set of general questions, a set of
concerns and issues much deserving of further exploration.
It is useful to remind ourselves first that the analysis of memory
conflicts is not just, or primarily, of academic interest. In the fall of 1991,
when I am writing these lines, the bloodshed in Yugoslavia, the modest
beginnings of a peace process in the Middle East, the great uncertainties
as to the future of what once was the Soviet Union, the strengthening of
neo-Nazi voices in Germany, all in their own way force a reminder on
the scholarly community. I am not an idealistic believer in the power of
academic words; at the same time, though, I do feel that social scientists
in particular ought to do better in terms of illuminating the tremendous
force inherent in what we politely call "historical grievances." Reading
the enlightened appeals to reason, I cannot help but think that we are
again missing something, that as long as we do not alter our models of
human action to allow for what Serbs and Croats were actually doing,
we are destined for comfortable insignificance.
Not all conflicts about the past result in people's killing each other, of
course. But that considerable numbers do ought to at least alert us to the
possibility, to the very real potential for violence. Nor do historical
grievances exhaust the list of disagreements between the warring sides.
But, again, the fact that they often figure so prominently on such lists
demands serious recognition, and an inquiry going beyond the comfort-
ing notion of ideological smokescreens. All too often, I think, we are
ready to see talk about the past or appeals to memory of compatriots as
useful propaganda techniques, as something that political activists cyni-
cally apply to motivate "the masses." I am sure some are doing just that,
yet the very effectiveness of such strategies points to their resonating
with deeply felt emotions. It is this emotional intensity that so clearly
varies in degree when we look at different memory conflicts, that
demands foremost analytical attention. What is it, we need to ask, that
makes people care so much about "their" past?
I am putting quotation marks around the possessive here to signal one
of the key qualities collective memory appears to acquire in conflict
situations-the identification of communal boundaries with distinct
visions of the shared past. For Serbs and Croats, the most divisive period
is that of World War II and its aftermath; the two sides have radically
different, if not opposite ways of recounting the events. As I listened to
72 Frames of Remembrance

Polish and Jewish voices describing life during the 1918-1939 period,
both ordinary people and historians would be painting such different
portraits of the times that the very idea of a shared past seemed almost
absurd. And yet it is precisely because a certain historical terrain was
coinhabited that most memory conflicts arise in the first place. (The
dividing lines need not be ethnic or national, one should stress at this
point. In France, they might be ideological; in the United States, often
regional in nature.)
What this implies is that analytically as well it is wise to look for the
sources of the conflict and the roots of its emotional intensity in the
historical experience itself. The "grievances" are usually not about times
of prosperity, peace, and happiness. Indeed, many of the continuing
conflicts about the past implicate periods of intense social and political
upheaval, if not war. The Turks refusing to acknowledge genocide of the
Armenians, the French struggling with the memory of the Vichy period,
the peoples in the former Soviet empire reckoning with the Communist
legacy-these are but a few examples of long-term disputes originating
in the past, however much propelled on or off public agenda by the
vicissitudes of the present.
The question such historical dependency raises, though, is one of its
explanatory power. Yes, knowing more about the conflict at source helps
us to appreciate the depth of emotions involved. But no, it cannot alone
account for persisting relevance of that past. For each example of
struggles that are remembered, we could, after all, cite a counterexample
of struggles long forgotten. This is one reason for my stressing the need
for more empirical studies, as they could shed some inductive light on
the question. My educated guess is that we would find the persistence of
conflict to be highly context-specific in cultural, social, and political
terms.
Before more case histories are written, though, it is both possible and
necessary to refine our analytical tools. Neither "conflict" nor "persist-
ence" of it are homogeneous phenomena. As the discussion of memory
disputes already suggests, conflicts manifest themselves in many dif-
ferent ways, calling upon us to use different methods for gathering data
as well as different explanatory strategies.
To begin, some conflicts are more manifest than others, in the sense
of acquiring public articulation. Where the public sphere is tightly
controlled by the state, as was the case in the pre-Gorbachev Soviet
 Conflicts 73

Union, the fabrication of consensus about the past created a barrier

difficult for researchers to penetrate. We now know that retained under
the allowed surface were many traditional ethnic grievances, for this is
what has emerged with the policy of glasnost. But to have known that
during the previous era, with virtually no access to the people themselves,
would have been hard indeed.
While totalitarian states are an extreme case of silencing the private
sphere, theirs is not an unique monopoly on public discourse. In
democratic societies we also find large sectors of the population not
having a voice in the public forum. If the recent efforts at "empower-
ment" of marginal groups are any indication, these groups would often
harbor memories sharply at odds with the established canons. Now
manifest, the conflicts are being exposed and studied. But once again,
their presence is not new and this ought to alert us to the need for paying
more attention to the publicly invisible.
At the other end of the analytical spectrum are conflicts firmly
entrenched within both the "infrastructure" of collective memory and the
cycles of communal remembrance. In France, for example, the public
sphere provides room for commemorating Petain, the head of the Vichy
government, as well as the heroes of the resistance; there are books
extolling the virtues of each Republic and books attacking them; there
are parades celebrating storming of the Bastille and there are the splen-
dors of Versailles. If at different times one perspective on the past may
be privileged over another, there does not seem to occur any complete
disappearance of the many cleavages that have been accumulating over
decades, if not centuries. 8 In a situation such as this one, an analyst might
be faced with an overabundance of material and the exercising of caution
would mean the careful weighing of what is or is not socially important.
Tracing the vicissitudes of conflict over time implicates primarily
questions about such public articulation-its forms, channels, intensity,
or periodic disappearances. But it also-and rather prominently at that-
implicates questions about time passage itself. The degree of experiential
distance from the events under dispute has a strong bearing on the
meaning and the relevance these events would carry for people. We now
know, for example, that challenges to the prevailing silences on the issues
of moral responsibility and the Holocaust came about-in West Ger-
many, in France, in Poland-when the children of those directly involved
were growing up. For a troubling past to become an openly contested
74 Frames of Remembrance

terrain, it might indeed be necessary that a certain distance be first

established. On the other hand, that past is still not too far removed from
the lived experience; the children questioned their parents, metaphori-
cally, if not literally, speaking. Time positioning such as this one-be-
tween individual memory and full detachment-is a likely source for
efforts to reevaluate the past, efforts with strong potential for generating
conflict.
On the other hand, the passage of time is an important factor to
consider when looking at those conflicts where an experiential connec-
tion no longer exists. Just as collective memory does not follow any
chronological order of priorities, its contested elements may too be found
close to or far indeed from the present. And just as consensual
remembrance rests on specific framing of the significance of the past, for
a conflict to persist or emerge, there must exist a particular understanding
of its relevance. What makes conflicts over a past long gone especially
interesting to analysts is exactly this need for defining and redefining
relevance. Once outside the experiential realm, the past does not naturally
generate passions of the kind we encounter in memory disputes. Thus,
to come back to our earlier question of what makes people care so deeply
about their past, it is very much a question about the social construction
of feelings.
Within the restricted terrain of direct personal experience, we may
expect that actual conflicts would carry on into the realm of collective
memory, or that emotions at source would be informing those to emerge
later. Even then, a public intervention into those private feelings can
reshape them, or at the least affect their impact. For example, as one
watched the developments in Czechoslovakia after the fall of the Com-
munist regime in 1989, with President Havel first appealing for forgive-
ness for all involved in the apparatus of oppression and then, in October
of 1991 acquiescing to sign a new law which sets a complex system of
punishments in place, it was not hard to imagine the effect of such a public
licence on private hatreds. 9 Havel was clearly in a predicament there,
opposed to any retribution, yet required to respond to pressures from
below, his initial attempts at emotional management of conflict proving
quite unsuccessful.
The jury, in Prague and elsewhere in the post-Communist world, is
still out as to which of the private feelings would be in the end allowed
to shape public memories of the regime. What is already apparent,
 Conflicts 75

though, is the complexity of the picture. Also, as the ranks of once united
oppositionists split-as most notably occurred within Poland's Solidarity
movement-the neat division into "us" and "them" that defined the lines
of memory conflicts along with all others gives way to a very untidy
situation indeed. And the now open channels for public debate, together
with the challenges of electoral politics, almost guarantee that social
engineering of people's emotional stance towards their recent past con-
tinue.
I do not wish to suggest that individual experience is irrelevant to this
process, nor that feelings could be created by public declaration only.
There are limits to what people would accept as the definition of what
just happened to them. I am suggesting that the most immediate links to
the past, the most deeply felt personal memories, become subject to
public framing and reframing just as much as those distant and detached.
The fate of collective memory is not sealed at source.
With the "realities of the past" far removed from any personal ex-
perience, we are far more likely to question the maintenance mechanisms
of conflict. When dealing with cases of social turmoil, we expect it to
affect people for some years to come; indeed, it is these instances of
consensus emerging on the ruins of conflict that would be most puzzling
us. But to understand why people still care about the American Civil War
or the French Revolution-or, to take the more recent example, about
Christopher Columbus-we can no longer draw on the direct experiential
connections. In the case of debates around Columbus's legacy, we cannot
even draw on the kind of linkage I suggested earlier, that is to a significant
conflict in the past, at least in the sense of events that Columbus himself
would have participated in. Does it mean that historical experience does
not mean anything? Are the struggles over memory simply a reflection
of the current issues and priorities, with history serving as a convenient
substitute (or additional) ground for fighting contemporary battles?
It might be tempting indeed to answer "yes" here, to see the past as
rich but raw material used to express, justify or defeat particular ideologi-
cal positions. Such an approach, though, begs the question of why is it
the past, or rather the construction site of different "realities of the past"
that is so used.
In keeping with my advocacy of an empirically grounded approach, I
would argue that the best way to answer this question is to look at how
it is answered in social practice. What claims being made about the pasts
76 Frames of Remembrance

long gone allow them to acquire (or retain) significance in contemporary

conflicts? The key word here is "in," for it is rare indeed that a conflict
about the past be only about the past. If vocal public disputes feature as
"tips of the iceberg," the more diffuse debates are equally immersed in
larger issues, concerns well beyond those with historical accuracy. And
it is these larger issues, or the matters at stake in memory conflicts, that
would be mostly responsible for the involvement and the intensity of
particular feelings. Evoking national pride is quite different from tacit
recognition of ideological principles, and defending the sacred is quite
different from defining a political agenda. The matters at stake, in other
words, frame how and how much people care.
Let me reemphasize at this point that such framing of emotions applies
both to events within the living memory of the participants as well as
those distant in time; the distinction itself is obviously subject to continu-
ing change due to the passage of time. If I am focusing here more on
strategies allowing the pasts long gone to retain significance, it is only
because those are more analytically visible, as it were, not as clouded by
the "natural" feelings stemming from people's experience. But as the
example of Czechoslovakia aimed to suggest, questioning such emotion-
al framing of the recent past is a path very much worth pursuing.
When exploring the processes of sustaining memory conflicts, it is
also useful to remind ourselves that our subject is indeed conflict. People
come to care a great deal about their past in a whole variety of contexts
and situations; some of these, like memory projects are discussed else-
where in the book. But what concerns us here is a rather different quality
of emotional involvement, inherent in the very presence of conflict. At
its most analytically basic level, the caring for the past is always coupled
here with having someone challenge your vision of it. How such chal-
lenges are socially defined may indeed hold the keys to the dynamic of
conflict itself; at the very least, it informs the issues which matter.
Whether or not a memory conflict acquires a powerful presence on
the public agenda is not simply reflective of the importance of issues at
stake. As I suggested earlier, the vicissitudes of conflict would be very
context-specific, so that our knowledge of its significance would serve
as a piece in the whole puzzle. 10 At the same time, though, it is an
indispensable piece of knowledge, something we need especially urgent-
ly when trying to predict (and prevent) outbursts of violence. All other
things being equal, some challenges to one's vision of the past represent
 Conflicts 77

more of a threat than others and thus carry the potential for defense going
beyond verbal arguments. Even when not actually resorting to arms,
people who feel threatened do not make good candidates for civic
cooperation with those who pose that threat.
At a first glance, we seem to have moved far away indeed from our
initial questioning of the debates surrounding the commemoration of
1492. And yet, some reports from South America already suggest (a year
early) the very real possibility of violent protest on the part of Indian
activists. What to the readers of the New York Times may be an intellec-
tually challenging exercise resonates rather differently among victim
groups. Their grievances are not solely historical, of course, but there is
a sense of continuity between what is defined as "cultural genocide" in
the past and the present lack of repentance. To celebrate Columbus
becomes a highly symbolically charged act of denial of responsibility, a
threat to the basic sense of justice. 11
That the ideal of justice figures so prominently in memory conflicts
of grave intensity is not coincidental. When killings, expulsion, oppres-
sion go unacknowledged, when these bring rewards rather than punish-
ments, when those responsible are allowed the comforts of forgetting,
the wounds remain open. The passing of time does not heal these wounds;
the fact that people who had committed the crimes are long dead does
not seem to matter. If the historical moral accounts have never been
settled, in other words, time collapses.
Commentators often express surprise that people in Ireland still care
about what happened in the twelfth century, or that Jews persist in holding
the Ukrainians responsible for the pogroms of the seventeenth, or that
American blacks continue to speak of slavery in language of the lived
experience. It is as if the past, once gone long enough, should somehow
become neutral. Had justice been perceived to have been rendered, this
would be indeed a reasonable expectation. But when it is not, the length
of time which has passed may be in fact compounding rather than
lessening the grievance.
In the memory conflict I studied closely, that between Poles and Jews
over the issue of responsibility for the fate of Polish Jews during the
Holocaust, I also found expressions of surprise. This time, it was not
about the "still caring" factor; it would be too early for that. But many
Polish observers were deeply upset that Jews appeared to care more about
the wrongs committed by Poles than those by the Nazis themselves.
78 Frames of Remembrance

There was outrage over such blatant reversal of moral priorities. Missing
until very recently was any recognition that the persistent denial of
responsibility on the part of the Poles, especially when contrasted with
the considerable efforts at moral accounting in West Germany, was the
key to the Jews' reaction.
The lesson here is an important one; it is not the "absolute weight" of
historically inflicted pain which matters. Rather, it is how people perceive
the consequences, mostly in terms of justice rendered but also justice
attempted. The implication, at the level of social practice in the present
(and the future), is that whenever possible, we should not allow moral
wrongs, on a large as well as small scale, to go publicly unnoticed. When
not confronted, discussed if not acted upon, the wounds do not heal, just
deepen. 12
Analytically, this concern translates into the need for more indepth
studies and thus understanding of the types of discursive practice which
would help conflict resolution. Not all "talk" serves the cause, not all
"silences" impede it. The settling of moral accounts is not a purely
symbolic or discursive matter, of course. Native Canadians, for example,
while speaking in rather conciliatory terms about the legacy of European
conquest, have in 1991 demanded no less than self-government. A
redistribution of power, territorial concessions, financial retributions, all
can and do enter the morally set agendas. To some people, these are the
matters that count, not the symbolic gestures of one kind or another. And
yet, as one hears of another bomb attack on a Turkish official, the
Armenian activists behind it call for a simple admission of guilt, nothing
more. We may abhor the tactics, but we also ought to recognize that, in
this case at least, the symbolic justice is the first priority.
When studying historical grievances in general, we would be well
advised not to impose our sense of priorities on the subject at hand. Too
often, the conflicts themselves are mired in misunderstanding of what
people care about, misperceptions as to the nature of particular "group
interests." An inquiry into strategies of conflict resolution can easily tum
into ineffective advocacy, unless we bring such understandings and
misunderstandings to the surface. In short, it is the participants' defini-
tions of justice (and injustice) which count, not ours.
All this is not to say that as scholars we remain morally neutral; the
grievances we study compel moral judgments and we should be aware
of the ones we make. Rather, I am calling for a critical neutrality of a
 Conflicts 79

different kind, one which makes us more sensitive to the ways moral
accounting actually proceeds. 13 We have a great deal to learn here and
deciding beforehand that struggles for historical justice are "really about
X" (as defined by our favorite theory) would be very counterproductive.
So far, we have been looking at grievances almost exclusively from
the perspective of the victimized groups, those who seek justice. To have
a fuller understanding of the dynamics of memory conflict, we now need
to raise some questions about the other side, those called upon to respond.
The emotional temperature, as it were, of a conflict is a product of both
sides' involvement; the defining of matters at stake, while more explicit
on the part of the victims, is not their exclusive property. And indeed, if
we see the challenge to one's vision of the past as a key element in conflict
situations, it is crucial to explore the meanings such challenges acquire.
Struggles for historical justice are not symmetrical in the sense that
both sides see them as such. Those Americans (or Italians, Spanish,
Portuguese) who defend the idea of celebrating the memory of Columbus
and his accomplishments do not necessarily deny (nor need to) that the
Native Americans had suffered greatly. What they are defending is
Columbus's "good name" and, by extension, the good name of Western
civilization. The debates, coming as they do after some years of heated
discussions about America's cultural heritage, link directly to those larger
issues of collective identity. To commemorate 1492 solely as the begin-
ning of genocide is to deny any worth to American society, to its
cherished values and myths. It is a threat to the core of the collective self.
Even those who see 1992 as an opportunity to reevaluate the past, to
engage in moral accounting-in the name of justice-cannot bypass that
issue; in their appeals, America emerges as strong and healthy enough to
be able to confront the dark chapters in its history. Thus the challenge to
America's sense of self-worth can be made to testify to it, provided
serious memory work is done. In that way, the conflict over Columbus's
legacy could ultimately be accommodated within the existing structures
of sensibility.
In this particular case, the potential for accommodation is high, I
believe, primarily because American public discourse has traditionally
allowed considerable room for self-criticism. It is also important that as
the legacy of 1492 is being debated, the voices heard come from rather
diverse quarters and not just a two bounded communities. The visions of
the past brought forward are not homogeneous either, rather, they split
80 Frames of Remembrance

and crack in complex, often ideologically unpredictable ways. Indeed, a

student of this conflict, ten years from now, will be facing quite a task of
identifying its politics.
In societies where the "national honor" has greater symbolic potency,
and where self-criticism might not be a common or valued practice, we
would expect the challenge represented by historical grievances not to
be as amenable to accommodation, if at alL We can also expect the
rhetoric of conflict there to be much more explicitly about collective
self-worth and reputation. In other words, the defining of calls for justice
as threats, usually from outside, to the communal well-being and dignity
is likely to be out in the open, used as the rallying points for social support
in ways rarely encountered on the American scene. This was a pattern I
observed in Poland, where mentions of the troubling record of an-
tisemitism would be greeted with personal attacks on the messengers for
"smearing the country's good name." A similar dynamic operated in
Austria a few years ago, when the international outcry about Kurt
Waldheim's past was defined as an attack on Austria's reputation, effec-
tively preventing internal debates. In Japan, the strong reluctance to allow
public discussion of its record of atrocities is also presented as a matter
of national honor. The boundaries between "us" and "them" are clearly
drawn, with critics from within often identified with outside forces, or
directly accused of betraying the national community. 14
When honor and self-worth are at stake, the potential for conflict
resolution may itself lie with the ways these are understood. It is possible
to redefine national honor so as to accommodate a critical reevaluation
of the past. In Poland, for example, several intellectuals have been
arguing in recent years about exposing the morally problematic chapters
in the country's history in the name of a healthy collective identity; to
speak of antisemitism or the cruel treatment of Germans and Ukrainians
in the aftermath of World War II would thus now be seen as an honorable
task, as something not only ethically correct but politically useful as well.
For Poland to have good relations with its neighbours, the reasoning goes,
and to retain international respect, it must deal honestly with the past,
however much it hurts. So far, the advocates of self-critical moral
accounting remain a minority, but as the ideological divisions within
society multiply, their voices gain more public resonance. In effect, when
different stances towards the past become parts of political "packages,"
the conflicting visions of history acquire new legitimacy. The "us" and
 Conflicts 81

"them" is no longer about patriots and outside intruders; the cleavages

move within the national community.
What is also interesting in the three cases of evoking national honor
we mentioned here is that Poland, Austria, and Japan present themselves
as victims of history under dispute. The challenge of assuming respon-
sibility for past wrongdoings, coming from another victimized group, is
thus doubly problematic. It calls for a total stepping out from one's
identity, no less. At stake is no longer "only" self-worth, but the basic
organizing structure of collective memory, at least of the contested past.
Where victimization defines a much longer "stretch" of self-definition-
as it did in Poland, with German and Soviet occupation in 1939-45
connected on one side to more than a century of partitions and struggles
against Russia, Prussia, and Austro-Hungary, and on the other side to the
imposition of the Communist rule-the resistance to any challenge of
the idea is ever greater. The evocation of honor and betrayal is not a
rhetorical strategy there, it reflects deeply felt emotions. And the gradual
displacement of that language by the vocabulary of ideological competi-
tion may be a reflection of newly discovered strengths as an agent in
history.
When we look at memory conflicts, as I suggested earlier, we ought
to treat their rhetoric seriously. Explicit references to national honor on
the one hand and to being victimized on the other tell us a great deal about
the basic moral obligations brought into play. Conflicts about the past
divide people and often bond the opposing sides; it is thus important to
know of previously existing communal boundaries. Are those reinforced
or redrawn by the memory conflict? How do definitions of "us" and
"them" emerge and possibly shift? Would ideologically grounded visions
of the past be as firmly defended as those expressing allegiance to one's
family and kin?
To pursue this line of inquiry is not an easy matter; what one is
attempting to "measure," in effect, is the degree of sacredness of
memories. If some conflicts about the past are benign, as it were, an
expected feature of sociopolitical life, other disputes engender hatred, if
not violence. How close a particular confrontation comes to one or the
other end of this continuum largely depends, I think, on the obligation
one feels to the contested memory. It is true, as we observed here, that
the "caring for one's past" is a social construct. But it is also true that the
process implicates emotions which are already, experientially, there.
82 Frames of Remembrance

Caring for one's kin-and for their memory-is a strong base to build
upon, in a way that political affiliations might not be. And "kin" is indeed
a pervasive image used to bond people, whether or not they are actually
blood related. It is this sense of kinship, of the past as direct ancestry, that
may account for particular potency of some memory conflicts-and the
relatively benign nature of others.
Once again, we can learn a great deal about this implicit dynamic from
instances of its public articulation, in this case, from conflicts about the
very nature of moral obligation to memory. In North America, for
example, there is now an ongoing debate between Native Canadian and
Native American leaders and professional archaeologists (together with
museum curators) as to the "proper" treatment of ancient Native
remains. 15 What these Native cultures define as sacred (in the strongest
sense of the term), those espousing the Western scientific ethos see as
valuable data. What one side defines as ancestors (in the broadest sense
of the term), the other treats as universal property. Contested here is not
so much a vision of history as the basic moral obligations to guide the
work of remembrance.
Another area of inquiry that could serve to illuminate the differences
between ideologically grounded memory conflicts and those implicating
the-past-as-sacred is the still much to be explored history of dissidence
in the countries under Communist rule. We know that, generally speak-
ing, the state-imposed official version of the national past had been a
direct assault on memories preserved by tradition and private tellings.
We also know that even under the most adverse of circumstances, certain
courageous people persisted in keeping forbidden records-or attending
to forbidden graves. Finally, we are beginning to appreciate the scope
and variety of strategies applied to smuggle oppositional memories into
the public sphere, from writing and reading "between the lines" to
imaginative uses of literary classics. To trace the choices made when
defending "historical truth," especially when those choices translated
into potentially harsh punishment by the regime, would be to gain a
firmer understanding of different ways of caring about collective
memory. There are some valuable lessons to be learned here about what
is and what is not perceived as sacred.
The risks taken by individuals struggling against the Communist
regime's assault on their memory were not uniformly high, of course;
much depended on the sociopolitical situation at the time as well as the
 Conflicts 83

nature of counterremembrance involved. Telling stories among family

and friends-perhaps the most effective method of preserving the unof-
ficial narratives-carried less risk than working to secure public record
through writing; poets in the Soviet Union of the 1970s faced the gulag
for composing the forbidden lines, while a filmmaker in Poland at that
time would only see his "wrong" work put in a Party vault. Recognizing
those differences is important, "risk" being a context-specific category.
When retracing the priorities set for oppositional memory work, we
would also need to factor in the difficulties of access to resources. In the
Soviet Union, unapproved typewriters were illegal for a very long time,
with paper in a chronic short supply; in the late 1970s, the Polish
authorities allowed private import of video recorders. Clearly, what
people could and could not practically do had an impact on their choices.
To assess the nature of moral obligations involved, it would be
especially important-and methodologically challenging-to locate the
many private expressions of oppositional memory. The yearly pilgrimage
to an unmarked grave of those killed by Security Forces, for example,
speaks of the sacredness of that memory in a way a scholarly article in
samizdat could not.
TI1e vicissitudes of conflict between the state and civil society under
Communist regimes may be unique for the sharp inequality of power and
resources. Yet what they illuminate especially well is an universal
dynamic of investment. Caring about one's past, or at least caring enough
to defend it against challenges, requires the individual to invest in that
memory, intellectually, emotionally as well as in more pragmatic ways.
When we pose the question of what is at stake in disputes over the past,
we would thus also be interested in the nature of such private engage-
ments. Even debates that appear as purely intellectual exercises can-and
often do-acquire moral dimension; being "right" or "wrong" about the
meaning of history is both a cognitive and an ethical category. People on
the opposing sides of a dispute judge each other in those terms; as the
words used are so frequently the same, it is important for analysts to
appreciate their separate realms of reference.
In the context of brief and general reflection on the dynamics of
memory conflicts, it would be impossible to give justice to the full variety
of issues, facts, figures, interpretations and "lessons of history" which
become subject to debates. As the many examples mentioned throughout
the book indicate, virtually all aspects of remembrance are open to
84 Frames of Remembrance

dispute, both during the construction of collective memory and its

subsequent uses, revisions, dismantlings. Conflicts are not departures
from the norm, in so far as they occur frequently and commonly. But they
are special. For analysts, they offer a wealth of data, making the invisible
ideas and feelings appear in highly articulate forms. For the participants,
investing in their "realities of the past" is also qualitatively distinct from
the more passive, if not indifferent modes of remembrance. The chal-
lenge, as I argued here, is better to understand the distinctiveness of
memory conflicts and especially their potential to destroy human trust if
not human lives.

Notes

1. Discussions with Harriet and Andrew Lyons, anthropologists who studied this
controversy, have been of great help to me.
2. Judith Balfe, unpublished paper.
3. I am relying here on my own analysis of statements found in the Polish press, and
especially those in the lay Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny. See also Carol
Rittner and John K. Roth, eds., Memory Offended: The Auschwitz Convent Con-
troversy (New York: Praeger, 1991).
4. See, for example, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Les Juifs, la nu!moire et le present (Paris:
Maspero, 1981).
5. A case in point is Norma Field, In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: A Portrait of
Japan at Century's End (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991).
6. See, especially, Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and
German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
7. Brigitte Young, presentation on the situation in Germany, Wilfrid Laurier University,
November 1992.
8. See Henri Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome. History and Memory in France since 1944,
translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1991).
9. In Poland, efforts to put a similar law into place resulted in a change of government
in June 1992; as of March 1993, three new proposals are still hotly debated. And,
in a truly bizarre twist, it is President Walesa himself who has been seeking an
official confirmation that he did not work as a Communist secret agent. The stakes,
in short, are very high.
10. For a study of "ethnic politics" exemplifying this approach, see Harold Troper and
Morton Weinfeld, Old Wounds: Jews, Ukrainians and the Hunt for Nazi War
Criminals in Canada (Markham, Ontario: Viking, 1988).
11. Implicity recognizing this principle, the government of Canada did forbid any offical
festivities in 1992.
12. It appears that in 1992, South African public debates on the future of their past
centered on exactly this issue.
13. The discussion of Spain during the Civil War in Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the
Construction of Society. Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification
 Conflicts 85

(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) exemplifies both the
challenges and the high returns of this approach.
14. See, especially, Norma Field, In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: A Portrait ofJapan
at Century's End (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991).
15. I thank Ron Grimes for first bringing this issue to my attention. For more discussion,
see Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures. The Poetics and
Politics of Museum Display (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991).
 5

Presence of the Past

How relevant is the past? How much public presence should it have?
How much presence does it have? When posed in such broad terms, these
questions may well be unanswerable. Yet they are also very basic to any
understanding of the dynamics of collective memory. Indeed, if often
implicitly, concerns with the presence of the past are at the core of these
reflections. In this chapter, I would like to give them the more explicit
attention they deserve.
One of the most analytically challenging issues here is that of selec-
tion. If the terrain of collective memory is vast and varied, it is also
structured. To uncover some of the principles at work in this structuring
of remembrance, we may have to first scale down the inquiry, though.
Recognizing just how complex the processes are that account for
presence of the past at the level of society-at-large, let us then begin with
questions about smaller units. What aspects of the past do families,
friends, colleagues, attend to?
Many a familial or institutional tale serves primarily as a warning and
a lesson. When I was growing up, for example, a story of my
grandfather's brother who managed to lose all of his extensive properties
in gambling was a grand and colorful piece of family lore. Somewhat
less impressive, but used for similar purpose were stories of my own bad
behavior as a small child; these, no longer directly relevant to my troubles
as a teenager, acquired the anticipatory quality of guidelines for paren-
thood. When a new employee enters a work setting, much of his "learning
the ropes" relies on careful listening to the warning tales of past mishaps.
The experiences framed into those useful stories need not be particularly
traumatic; indeed, remembrance of traumas follows a very different
logic. Their appeal rests on the clarity of moral as well as pragmatic lines,

87
88 Frames of Remembnmce

for not only is "good" separated from "bad" but also the consequences
of action are well defined. Hypothetically, fictional accounts could work
just as well here, and some indeed do. 1 But the historical reality behind
the tale adds greatly to its force, anchoring the tale, as it were, in familiar
surroundings. Not all bosses are created equal, so that getting to know
this one's idiosyncracies is a lot more helpful than generalized advice.
And while we tend to think of moral nonns in universal terms, these too
are practically worked out in smaller settings.
A similar mixture of moral and pragmatic guidance may be found in
the second type of frequently told stories about the past-the inspiring
tales of accomplishment. Once again, although fictional figures-or
public persona-serve just as well to illustrate the paths to success,
attending to the family's own history adds in flavor and specificity here.
The very meaning of "accomplishment" can best be worked out in those
tellings, and it is something that varies greatly. Positive feelings
generated in the process are of value in and of themselves, too.
Remembrance becomes an aid, in effect, in weathering the present.
Beyond drawing on the past for lessons, for a reconfirmation of the
moral order as well as its redefinition, a less instrumental approach may
also secure a presence for remembrance. Not focusing on specific narra-
tives and concrete individuals, going back in time through reminiscing,
usually warmly, about the days gone by is something we often do for its
own sake. 2 The pleasure derived from such reminiscing has a great deal
to do with our social nature; bonds between people, formed in shared
experience, demand renewing through the telling. Many a social occasion
is indeed designed partly to evoke reminiscence. And the travel industry
taps into this process as well, by providing us with the physical means to
go back. The past as a cosy home, however imaginary or sentimentalized,
is nice to return to.
Indeed, if we look inside people's homes, it becomes apparent that for
most of us, comfort translates into the presence of a past. Whether it be
in photographs or a collection of rocks, reminders of where we had been
are all around us. What we include in our "memory household" is subject
to deeply felt rules of selection, as many a quarrel between two people
moving in together can testify. To outsiders, the choices made may be
unintelligible, or categorized under the heading of "taste" which does not
give them justice. To ourselves, the whole process is not visible either,
until the time comes that we have to move-and pack. Then, the symbolic
 Presence of the Past 89

"nest" we have constructed, about to be dismantled, demands our atten-

tion if not fullfledged justification for its existence.
Within our memory households, there are both autobiographical
reminders and elements of the much more distant past
(greatgrandparents' chest, for example), with a special place often
reserved for objects evoking people dear to us who are no longer there.
Highly individualized-even when using common tools such as
photographs-these symbolic nests are extensions of our self. Being
deprived of them, even if only temporarily, can result in a deep sense of
loss. Not demanding our active attention, most of the time, a memory
household offers an anchor, the comfort of continuity and identity.
If the contents of our memory household tend to accumulate quietly
over time, they can also be subject to more dramatic and direct change.
Individual growth may call for a break with the past (or, more likely, with
a part of it), in which case certain reminding fixtures are deemed to
disappear. 3 There are times when the presentation of self demands
considerable dramaturgical skills in rearranging, hiding, highlighting
only the appropriate memory markers. And there are times when ex-
perience itself is too disruptive to our sense of self to be granted any
permanency of reminders. Those could also be times for a renewed
search of the past for comfort and solace.
The work involved in the construction and maintenance of our
memory household is often quite invisible. The form of presence we grant
to our past is also, for the most part, not compelling. Glancing at the
familiar objects around us can direct our thoughts to the past, but it does
not have to, and indeed, much of the time, it is not supposed to. Getting
on with our everyday routines would be next to impossible were we to
dwell constantly in the past. On the other hand, without the supports of
our private "infrastructure" of memory, we may feel quite disoriented or
even threatened in our identity.
On a societal scale, memory work continuously going on is visible.
But precisely because it is visible and justifiably commending our
analytical attention, its dynamics can overshadow the quieter, uncom-
pelling presence of the past. For even in places where the crowded public
discourse emphasizes concerns with the present and the future, or among
peoples with what we may see as a low level of historical awareness, the
past does not disappear. Not attended to, not dwelt upon, not subject to
major disputes, "realities of the past" stay in the background neverthe-
90 Frames of Remembrance

less. Always potentially retrievable from the extant "records," be those

a stretch of buildings or a book, meanings attached to the past lose some
of their clarity and potency, but they can be· filled in again when an
occasion arises. Urban neighbourhoods in many North American cities
provide a terrain rich in such "dormant" collective memory; ordinarily
not evoking warm remembrance for their inhabitants, they can do just
that for people who left the places behind decades (or generations) ago. 4
This process of retrieval may involve individuals, or it may be a collective
undertaking, in which case a new frame of remembrance is likely to
emerge. Declaring an old courthouse in the Bronx an historical landmark,
with all the renovation, plaques, and ceremony this may entail, differs
thus from leaving it quietly to speak of the old days.
Remembrance too has its own "infrastructure." Parts of it might be
continuously in use, while other parts remain unattended for long
stretches of time. And over time, the meaning attached to both often
changes. A book which, when it appeared sixty years ago, had the power
to define experience in the trenches of World War I for millions of
readers, All Quiet on the Western Front, is hardly read today. But when
it is read, and especially when it is being analyzed, it is taken as a memory
marker of a different kind altogether, a sign of its own time. 5 This
phenomenon of a sedimentation of meaning is not uncommon in the
process of retrieving abandoned pieces of the memory's "infrastructure."
It is a way of preserving some of the original symbolic texture while
looking from a current perspective. And if historians and critics do it with
a whole armature of specialized knowledge, visitors to a pioneer village
recreating the life of Ontarians in the nineteenth century proceed in a
very similar fashion indeed. Whether applied to something which in its
time served to evoke memory, in other words, or to something which
only now is designed to do that, the mixing of original and contemporary
meanings secures a new presence for the past.
From the point of view of individuals, a great deal of the collective
memory markers retain such dormant presence. Public attention, though
directed towards a larger share of the extant "infrastructure," still leaves
much outside its sphere of immediate relevance. For analytical purposes,
that which is left outside becomes muted. If not given a public voice at
some point, it is in danger of disappearing from view altogether. 6 When
speaking of the presence of the past, we should recognize this serious
limitation to our analytical endeavors. We can also expect that as the
 Presence of the Past 91

study of collective memory matures, we will learn more about its dormant
qualities.
The idea of memory households that offer comfort and an anchor, all
the while leaving much of the past contained there dormant, becomes
particularly useful when we reflect on the now broader questions about
remembrance and collective self. If how much presence is given to the
past varies, from community to community and across historical time, a
part of this variation, I think, lies with the very materials that are used to
build the common memory household.
North American visitors to Europe often comment, with awe and some
regret, on the ease of visceral contact with the past when in Rome, Athens,
or Paris. When I left Warsaw and came to Canada as a young adult, my
establishing of links with the new country took the form of exploring its
vastness and beauty. When asked, my Canadian friends too would point
to the Ontario lakes or British Columbia forests, rather than any historical
buildings, as their key identity references. As the now strengthening
movement for "heritage preservation" testifies, many people might con-
sider both the natural and human-built environments as important for
communal self. Yet the tangible, visible differences in the length of a
shared history matter. How we relate to the past, or more specifically,
how much the past is made to serve as a base for collective identity, may
well reflect simply what is available. 7
And yet we know that even when visible memory markers are present
in abundance, remembrance of the past they are marking is not automat-
ically guaranteed, nor is its meaning constant. Memory too has a history,
so that what once testified to imperial glories may be later relegated to
colorful curiosum (or, as in the former Soviet Union, to a memento of
oppression). Jewish cemeteries and synagogues, while very much there
throughout Eastern Europe, command attention of only a few passers-by.
How, if at all, they serve as memory markers depends on new significance
they acquire as parts of national (and international) heritage. Large
migrations that followed the end of World War II resulted in massive
disconnections between historical landscapes and their "owners." Again,
markers that meant a lot to Germans in Breslau mean little to Poles in
Wroclaw.
The scarcity of available, tangible resources can be compensated for
with other means, of course. If Americans have only a few monuments
to their conquest of the West, movies do the mythic work just as well.
92 Frames of Remembrance

Literature about the lost homelands in Europe not only preserves their
image in nostalgic tones, it also gives them cultural significance well
beyond that of historically concrete sites; myths emerge almost naturally
here, as the sense of loss acquires permanence. 8 The narrative of "this is
where we come from," in other words, draws strength from the physical
reminders of the past, but is not dependent on them. Visual, emotional as
well as intellectual referents of memory-of-the-origins must exist in
some form; what that form is varies greatly.
How the relative absence of physical markers is compensated for, if
at all, depends largely on how important memory-of-the-origins be-
comes, for different peoples, at different points in time. And that, in tum,
may depend on the more specific framing of remembrance in relation to
collective identity.
Elsewhere in this book, we discuss how the shared past matters for
communities of memory, large and small. The recognition of powers
inherent in collective memory for the construction and maintenance of
collective identity should not obscure from view the often problematic
relation between the two. Collective memory is only one of the forces
that bond people together; even within the notion of "tradition" included
are values and common ways of doing things which transcend any
specifiable time in tJ-,e past. 9 Goals, aspirations, fears, as well as ties of
kinship can draw strength from collective memory-but they do not have
to.
For people struggling to maintain their identity against historical
forces of conquest, oppression or dispersion, their (often mythical) past
acquires great significance. The stories of grandeur, of victories against
adversity, of sheer perseverance-all offer both solace and inspiration.
Among Canada's Ukrainians, for example, the dream of national inde-
pendence, kept very much alive by successive waves of emigrants, rested
on an historical narrative both strongly felt and strongly defended from
any antisolace criticisms by others (in this case, mostly Jews and Poles
who also had roots in the land). 10
In the countries of Central Europe that were subjected to Soviet
domination, and whose memories were being ideologically assaulted in
truly Orwellian manner, the past served as the key battle terrain for
rescuing national identity. 11 For Western observers, the explosion of
commemoration during the brief first reign of Solidarity in Poland
bordered on inexplicable obsession, especially in the context of dire
 Presence of the Past 93

economic situation. 12 And yet, the vivid presence of remembrance, in all

its powerful symbolism, was a very logical result of suddenly freeing
access to the public sphere. Battles long fought in private or between-
the-public-lines moved into the open. When collective memory had to
go underground again (with the declaration of martial law in 1981), its
potency only grew. Yet when the political situation dramatically changed
at the end of the decade, spelling the beginnings of democracy, something
quite remarkable happened to remembrance as well. The past, especially
the previously forbidden past, acquired an enormous share of public
discourse. Many Poles, also beyond intellectual circles, began to voice
protest. 13 Why? Because a country in the midst of a grand economic
experiment (and crisis), building the foundations of its polity and inter-
national relations, was now seen as held back by too much attending to
its past. Resurrecting political programs from pre-World War I era, which
might have worked as training for democracy under the Communist
regime, was often deemed sheer madness in the new circumstances. The
highly negative perceptions of Poland's neighbours, maintained by
memory (in the case of Germans, both private and public), would now
be judged as the most serious impediment to any successful integration
with Europe. Lessons drawn from history, in other words, became
counterproductive.
This particular dispute over the significance of memory had many
interesting twists. Just as in other countries of the region, for example,
local authorities in Poland took to the changing of names with great zeal.
Streets, city squares, (whole towns in Germany), schools, hospitals, were
given new-old patrons without much deliberation or thought, it seemed.
Whole chapters of perfectly good history were destined for oblivion, as
any connection with the Left became suspect. The often public smashing
of monuments, especially those of Lenin, completed the picture of a great
will to erase all markers of the Communist past. Again, some observers,
sensitive to the irony of Orwell-in-reverse, began to protest.
Though the word itself was discredited by its previous usage by the
regime, "normalization" of collective memory was being appealed for.
It was as if the special place accorded to remembrance before had to in
itself become part of memory. Normality, in congruence with democracy,
destined the past to a much more limited sphere of public observance and
public knowledge. It is not that memory is not to matter, far from it, but
it is not to be the sole determinant of the present and the future.
94 Frames of Remembrance

The pains of transition from an all-encompassing frame for

remembrance to one reducing it to size are understandable. At stake here
is a redefinition of collective identity itself. A parallel process, though in
the opposite direction, as it were, may be equally difficult. In Germany,
or rather in West Germany a few years before unification, an intense
public debate, with historians at the center, put into question the place of
memory in that country's identity. 14 After the postwar decades of drawing
on the constitution and thus a pledge to democracy for the idea of
"Germanness," voices of doubt were raised as to the implicit prohibition
on remembrance. The Germans, of course, were asked by everyone
"never to forget" the Nazi regime, but they were also reprimanded for
any celebration of national heritage showing signs of nationalist longing
(which did cover a great deal of territory). Now they asked how were
they possibly to become a "normal nation" without recourse to the whole
of their history. This question may not have an answer, at least one that
would be morally acceptable. But we may expect that Germany as a great
European power will gradually enlarge the scope of a publicly celebrated
past. We can only hope that the wound of 1933-1945 will not be easily
healed in the process. For while framing remembrance of that period as
"inspiring" appears to outsiders as impossible to accomplish, the already
achieved privatization of memory, allowing for the "suffering" frame to
emerge carries the potential of doing just that. 15
The dilemma posed by German history-that of the integration of its
horrifying chapters into what should essentially be an inspiring narra-
tive-is the most acute version of a problem shared by many a collec-
tivity. What is to be done with remembrance engendering shame, doubt,
or feelings of guilt? How much presence should be granted to a morally
problematic, challenging past? Can one be asked to commemorate mis-
takes and failures?
One of the key arguments used to justify the lessening of attention to
the Nazi crimes (in Germany and elsewhere, in disputes over war
criminals in particular) is that the sheer passage of time removes that past
from the sphere of direct communal responsibility. One of the key
arguments for the continuing emphasis on the Nazi period is that with
the passage of time, moral lessons acquire ever greater universal sig-
nificance. On both sides, the increasing distance in time appears to
reframe remembrance, from that of concrete individual actions to one of
general cultural background. That for some people, such reframing spells
 Presence of the Past 95

the end of the need to confront the past is understandable. It reflects a

conception of moral responsibility oriented around specific historical
actors and their deeds. In such direct terms, young Germans, born long
after the war, indeed cannot be held accountable. That for other people,
the growing distance in time spells exactly the opposite is equally
understandable. For it reflects the idea that moral responsibility carries
a large indirect component, so that all people identifying themselves with
the "Western civilization" ought to confront what their culture had
produced. And, among the "all," people brought up in Germany face an
especially urgent task, as it was in their country where different (and
differently shared) cultural forces combined to enact the "Final Solu-
tion." In effect, then, while the passage of time makes dealing with the
past easier in that one is no longer compelled to question one's own
parents, the presence of that past becomes a great deal more pronounced,
more widespread, as it were. The moral challenge, too, addresses itself,
albeit in different fonns, to a great deal more people.
In that process of distancing and generalization, the burden of the past
is not lessened. If anything, the moral questioning in the face of the
Holocaust acquires new and often heavy weight when it begins to
incorporate historically specific actions and their less tangible social
context. To take but one example: in France, where the record of helping
and resisting the implementation of the "Final Solution" is mixed indeed,
the hard memory work, raising very troubling questions, is not about facts
and figures. Rather, it involves a highly critical exploration of the
intellectual and emotional heritage on the Right-and the Left-of
attitudes towards the Jew, an exploration going back into prerevolution-
ary times. 16 Issues of direct responsibility do not disappear from the
agenda, but it is their historical contextualization which largely accounts
for their significance as a moral challenge to French society in general.
What we have here is an effort to integrate the undeniably difficult
chapter in France's history through a construction of complex ideological
linkages, and thus making the past immediately relevant to the present.
As much as this effort may be undertaken in the name of moral necessity
(and memory obligations), its public acceptance, however grudging at
times, rests on its immersion in contemporary politics. Implicitly as well
as explicitly, the dwelling on history many would prefer to forget is made
possible, if not justifiable, by the present. It is also very much helped,
however paradoxically, by the growing popularity of extreme
96 Frames of Remembrance

xenophobia espoused by Le Pen's National Front; the idea of ridding

France of "target populations" acquires more than historical resonance.
In the case of Germany, the sheer enormity of the Nazi crimes, together
with continuing, albeit fluctuating, international pressure renders the
Nazi period difficult not to confront. More frequently, though, the vicis-
situdes of remembrance of troubling past follow the model encountered
in France, that is the needs of the present. At its very basic, "troubling
past" must first be so defined for it to be confronted. To gain a presence
on the public agenda, it also needs to be deemed important, important
beyond the generally weak justification of moral necessity. Some people
may, of course, be deeply sensitive to the moral propriety of their
community and pursue the challenging task of confronting the im-
propriety on its own merit. But for a community of memory as a whole,
engaging in moral accounting cannot be expected to follow from high
standards alone. The additional, and often more than sufficient motiva-
tion, is provided by pragmatic necessities of the present-or by an active
solicitation from those wronged in the past.
Recognizing that the morally troubling past is nearly always a record
of doing harm to others, it is not at all surprising that the prime chal-
lengers to the communal sense of well-being would be its victims. On an
international scale, the prime example of the (so far unsuccessful)
challenge to remembrance has been the Armenians struggling for an
acknowledgment of their genocide by and from the Turks. Victim groups,
such as Native Indians in North America, may be joined by other people
of conscience, of course; still, it is with their claims that the memory work
begins. In other instances, victim groups' voice may indeed be over-
powered by that of morally troubled perpetrators themselves-the anti-
imperialism rhetoric of protest in the West comes to mind. But whether
on their own, or with the help of the community's righteous non-Other,
the victims' narrative of victimization is the one focused on. In that sense,
the initiative and ultimately control over the framing (or reframing) of
remembrance belongs on the outside of a community of memory. (This
might explain why the whole process is arduous and long-lasting, as well
as how its success depends on the degree of self-criticism rarely en-
countered in social life.)
A critical examination of one's record towards the Other gains a great
deal more acceptability when initiated by shifts in patterns and goals of
coexistence. As Central and Eastern Europe sheds the Communist yoke,
 Presence of the Past 97

it becomes clear that for the region peacefully to enjoy a future, a great
many past scores must be settled. 17 In most of these countries, minority
populations have not been treated well; once again, the prospects of
democratic rule are very much dependent on the extent of moral account-
ing. And if in much of the region, Jewish presence is minuscule, the
apparent popular appeal of antisemitism testifies to the need for confront-
ing the Holocaust, meaning not only the records of indifference or
cooperation with the Nazis but also (and perhaps more significantly) the
records of postwar violence and hostility to survivors.
On that last point, one may ultimately count only on the good will of
Gentiles, rather than pressure from the Jews, though the efforts of Israel
and Western Jewish organizations cannot be discounted here. But as far
as relations between the Czechs and the Poles, or the Hungarians and the
Rumanians, or the Ukrainians and the Poles, be it across or within the
shifting national borders-these are all subject to critical reexamination
under tremendous political pressures. Theoretically, it would, of course,
be preferable to engage in moral accounting in less stressful circumstan-
ces. But practically, the well-established patterns of remembrance have
little chance of being displaced unless a great deal is at stake politically.
Even then, as the recent record shows, admitting to one's people's
oppressive treatment of others does not automatically follow appeals for
mutual understanding. But it is a start.
Whatever the dynamics behind the public reevaluation of the past, at
issue here is a major challenge to the narratives of collective identity. At
times, it is a challenge to one or two components of the narrative; often,
it is a more serious one from a counter-narrative which is effectively
being produced in the process. The significance of the challenge is not
lost on those involved; the arguments for continuing with the unpleasant
task of critical examination of the past are strong arguments, couched in
terms of moral, political, social necessity. And even if no direct action in
the present is called for (such as reparations to those wronged, for
example), many a subtle shift in recounting the past acquire strong
symbolic qualities. To take but one example: when Ukrainians living in
Poland are permitted to use Ukrainian names again for their villages and
hamlets, there is no mistake as to how important the gesture is as a step
towards accommodating a Ukrainian presence in Poland's recent past.
Whether the challengers to the communal sense of well-being come
from within or from without, the element of empathy with the Other is a
98 Frames of Remembrance

key orienting force in the process. Seeing the past from a different
perspective is a challenge, even when no morally troubling questions
arise. It is in the nature of collective identity that it provides an extensive
interpretive grid for classifying people and events in the world, past and
present. To ask people to understand the Other's views is to ask for an
often difficult imaginative leap, for a stepping out of comfortable pat-
terns. To make it possible, resources must accompany broad appeals and
editorials from opinion makers. The Other's own voice has to be heard,
the Other's own past must acquire a presence. 18
In recent years, Poland, more than perhaps any other country in the
region, has set to recover its Jewish heritage. Starting with the principle
of long-shared history, Polish intellectuals framed the process as both a
fulfilment of a moral obligation and an enrichment of national culture.
Books, articles, exhibits, movies, plays, lectures, and seminars-a
veritable deluge of resources, available for the very first time in Polish-
Jewish history-exposed the young people in particular to a rich Jewish
culture. Yet it also, inadvertently at times, exposed them to a very
different perspective on Poland's history. And this proved to be as much
of a challenge as the very direct questions about the country's role in the
Holocaust. The whole structure of seeing the Jew as an inferior Other
(and thus confirmation of the superior Pole) risked collapse. It did not.
But the accommodation with the distinct, if not disturbing, telling of the
past has proven problematic. One of the strategies used has been to make
the distinct appealing in and of itself-to make the Jew exotic and
unthreatening. Another consists of indeed reexamining, piece by piece,
the accepted historical record to arrive at more balanced accounts.
Selective listening, involved in both, is an invaluable aid in the process.
Poles, it must be recognized, are in a rather unique situation in that they
exercise total control over reframing of remembrance; the Jew is an
invited guest.
If the case of Poland and the Jew is unique in the extent of control on
the part of host memory, as it were, it also exemplifies a common pattern
of attending to the past for ideological (rather than more directly political)
reasons. The interest in things Jewish began with-and was encouraged
by-an effort to define Polish society as pluralistic and this, by all key
political actors on the then Communist stage. Attitudes towards the Jew
became a form of "litmus test" for the quality of self-definition. In the
circumstances where Jewish presence was minimal, it was the memory
 Presence of the Past 99

of the Jew that gained prominence. The choice of that memory was not
coincidental-its symbolic significance for the Poles' collective identity
is high-but the very decision to propel the discovery of Jewish heritage
bore little, if any, relation to history itself. Rather, in what appears to be
a general pattern, the granting of presence to a particular past followed
its newly defined "fit" with current concerns and debates.
That the past is often called upon to respond to ongoing shifts in
collective self-definition is very much in evidence in North America
today. Canadians, having introduced the idea of theirs being a multicul-
tural society back in 1971, can now not only read a fast growing series
of books about the different ethnic communities, but are also being
confronted with an equally fast growing list of grievances from groups
wronged in the past. 19 The recovery of historical record, while widely
accepted as essential for building a solid foundation for the new Canadian
identity, is thus by no means unproblematic. The very focus on diverse
histories is hard enough to accommodate with the idea of national unity,
but especially so when the narratives speak of oppression. The challenge,
for all the contextual differences, appears to parallel what we encountered
in the case of Poland-how is one to balance the need for comfort, and
thus the pleasingly exotic Other, with the demands for the not so pleasant
self-criticism. (The American reader is asked here to reflect on this
dynamics in American terms.)
The key lesson which emerges here is that the relation between
collective memory and collective identity can be and often is
problematic. Yes, on whatever scale of human bonds, we do draw
strength from the shared past. And yes, history offers a great deal of
comfort, inspiration and the essential anchoring for the self. But history
can also be a burden, a troublesome obstacle to the sense of common
identity and well-being. Even families face this predicatment, trying as
they might to erase memories of abuse, for example. The presence of the
past, for all its fit within the current agendas, is often disquieting. It is
not surprising, then, that questions about the "correct" role of
remembrance in public life are so frequently subject to intense debate.
However implicitly, ordinary people and opinion makers alike do recog-
nize that much is at stake when granting presence to a past. As students
of collective memory, we are well advised to listen to their voices in order
better to apprehend how and why the past is deemed meaningful, if at
all.
100 Frames of Remembrance

Notes

l. See Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson, eds., The Myths We Live By (London and
New York: Routledge, 1990).
2. See, especially, Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987).
3. For an insightful discussion of how individuals "rewrite history," see Erving
Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,
1959).
4. See, for example, Irving Louis Horowitz, Daydreams and Nightmares: Reflections
of a Harlem Childhood (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990).
5. See Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern
Age (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1989).
6. This was partly the motivation behind the multivolume Les lieux de mimoire, edited
by Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1982-93).
7. For comparative materials, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflec-
tions on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso,
1983).
8. In post-1945 Polish literature, for example, a special place is reserved for works
about the eastern lands "kresy"; Czeslaw Milosz' writings are representative here.
Similarly, many German authors-most prominently Gunther Grass-secure
presence for their lost eastern homeland.
9. See, especially, Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989).
10. Harold Troper and Morton Weinfeld, Old Wounds: Jews, Ukrainians and the Hunt
for Nazi War Criminals in Canada (Markham, Ont.: Viking, 1988).
11. See Alain Brossat, Sonia Combe, Jean-Yves Potel, Jean-Charles Szurek, eds., A
l'Est, la mimoire retrouvie (Paris: Editions Ia Decouverte, 1990).
12. See, especially, Lawrence Weschler, The Passion of Poland: From Solidarity
Through the State of War-The Complete New Yorker Reports on Poland (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1984).
13. The subject was a major concern, of articles as well as letters to the editor, in
Polityka, a popular weekly.
14. See, especially, Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and
German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
15. For a further discussion, see Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of
History as Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).
16. See, for example, Zeev Sternhell, Ni droite ni gauche: L 'idiologiefasciste en France
(Paris: Seuil, 1983).
17. For more discussion, see Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, "In Search of Usable Pasts," Society
30, 2 (January/February 1993):32-36.
18. For further reflection on this dynamic in North American terms, see Ivan Karp,
Christine Mullen Kraemer, and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Museums and Communities.
The Politics of Public Culture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1992).
19. By the early 1990s, this would include Native, Japanese, Chinese, Ukrainian,
Jewish, Italian, as well as black Canadians.
 6

Memory in Future Tense

Tempting as it might be in these turbulent times, this chapter does not

set out to predict the future of remembrance or otherwise. Rather, it is a
reflection on the ways future-as a vision-enters the process of con-
structing and framing "realities of the past."
Analytically as well as for pragmatic reasons, studies of the dynamics
of collective memory concentrate on the relationships between the past
and the present. Whether when tracing back specific histories of memory
or when looking at the contemporary scene, our data, our concerns, the
theoretical parameters we use, all quite naturally fall within the
past/present nexus. And yet, while trying to understand why people do
what they do to secure or disrupt remembrance, we need a place for their
sense of the future. At its most fundamental, much of memory work is
done "for posterity." And beyond such a general role as an orienting
force, there are times when a very specific vision of the future frames the
utilization of the past. That those specific visions emerge in specific
historical circumstances allows for their analysis to pursue familiar
questions about the sociopolitical context. But it also necessitates open-
ing some new lines of inquiry, precisely to account for the directness of
connecting the future to the past. It is, after all, not at all obvious why
looking forward ought to implicate looking back.
Let us begin with the more diffuse and often implicit role assigned to
the future in the construction of collective memory-that of an audience.
When historical buildings are being preserved, monuments erected, new
museums built, the sizeable costs involved in such endeavors are rarely
justified on the basis of the present needs of the community. Envisioned
as long-term investments, these memory works are to enjoy meaningful
life for decades, if not centuries after their original audiences are gone.

101
102 Frames of Remembrance

Yet a reflection on what this implies does not automatically enter the
considerations of planners and designers, beyond the immediate
demands of physical durability. Most often, the attitude seems to be that
what is being produced today will function as "witness to the times" (both
the present and the past) in much the same way the older memory works
have done for us. It is an attitude of a certain resignation to the inherent
unpredictability of the future; it is a recognition of continuity in the
human condition, one which translates into modest hopes that the work
at hand indeed endures. The future generations, while very much the
intended audience for the current endeavors, are too much like us to make
a difference. And we are, one should add, not all that different from the
generations which came before us. 1 Remembrance, in this view, emerges
as a fairly stable quality of human affairs, something we help secure but
not something we tinker with much.
This tried and traditional approach is being gradually challenged by
developments within the artistic and academic communities, and espe-
cially those affecting the discipline of curatorship itself. 2 On a recent visit
to the new Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa-Hull, I was
sharply reminded of the need to include "future" within the analytical
parameters of studying collective memory. Opened in 1989, this is a
self-consciously different museum, a "museum for the global village,"
according to its designers. It is a museum with an explicit (and publish-
ed)3 vision, not only of its purpose-this being the promotion of inter-
cultural understanding-but also of its future users. Drawing on careful
demographic and sociological analyses, as well as the experiences
around the world in staging historical displays, be it in museums or theme
parks, the Canadian planners opted for a multimedia combination of
pedagogy and entertainment. The operative premise here is one of
profound discontinuity between what worked yesterday and what would
work tomorrow, all the while the changes occurring in the present are
seen as viable indicators for planning for the future.
Beyond designing an essentially user-friendly museum, curators in
Ottawa went a step further. Prominent in their statement of vision is the
recognition of what might be broadly termed a postmodem dilemma-
the need for a museum not to claim authority on historical truth, all the
while constructing legible exhibits about the past. What is at stake here
is no longer the practical demands of attracting visitors-the Canadian
Museum of Civilization offers both a large hands-on children's section,
 Memory in Future Tense 103

a grand store with objects attesting to the "experience" (curators' term)

and the world's largest movie screen. Rather, it is a new philosophy of
memory work, combining efforts by the museum staff with those of
visitors. In the future, the assumption seems to be, people will indeed be
responding very differently to treasures from the past and thus new, more
interactive strategies are required. If some of the old ways of museum
displays might be retained for a while, the orientation of present thinking
and planning is definitely forward. 4
Considering the sophisticated terms used to describe this museum as
a "process" and a "vision," I found it somewhat ironic that the key exhibit
serving as a showcase for both the museum itself and the "Canadian
civilization" is unabashedly ahistorical. Artifacts, house frontals, totem
poles, and other ritual objects, originating with six different tribes on the
northwest coast, are placed together with no regard for where or when
they came from. The result is spectacular, not least because of the grand
scale and the interplay of light. But is a beautification without context
what is meant by "intercultural understanding"? Apparently, while the
idea of Native Canadian display introducing visitors to the museum was
there from the start, the specific choices reflected the fact that the only
Canadian attraction warranting three stars in the Michelin tourist guide
is a Haida village on the west coast. No comment.
It might be argued that for a publicly funded institution, in these times
of fiscal restraint, not to prepare for the future would be folly. It will still
need to be shown, in the years to come, that the museum's vision of a
"postmodem visitor" is a viable one.
The Canadian Museum of Civilization is clearly not an isolated case.
To what extent the ideas of postmodemism would be affecting memory
works destined for popular consumption is still an open question. Else-
where in this book, I have pointed to the generally greater self-conscious-
ness on the part of memory workers that comes with current
preoccupation with the meaning of "history" and "truth." What I think
calls for much further inquiry is the issue foregrounded on the drawing
boards at the museum-the impact of imagining the future audience.
Clearly, not all memory work, conscious of itself, integrates a vision of
the future. We may also expect such visions that are active to vary greatly,
in content and longevity, as it were. And we know far too little about
historical precedents for the current predicaments. In short, there is a
great deal of empirical work to be done.
104 Frames of Remembrance

Imagining the future audience affects not only the finished products
of memory workers; on a much broader scale now, it guides many of the
activities aimed at securing the raw materials to be used in times to come.
Again, museums, in their role as official collectors, play an important
role here, selecting, labelling, storing, and altogether making certain
artifacts available for future students as well as exhibitors. Archives, too,
the traditional guardians of documentary evidence, expand their
capacities to include an evergrowing range of material. The key force
operating here appears to be the technology itself. With the development
of computer data bases, our ability to store information has grown
exponentially. In a sense, the opening of a possibility to record just about
everything that was printed-and said or shown-in the public sphere
can make the very idea of selection redundant, other than as a sign of
fiscal restraint. With the growing interest that we have in the lives of
ordinary people in times past comes an implicit expectation, too, that our
everyday life is worth recording. If we often find it extremely difficult
to reconstruct such historical ordinariness, our efforts today should make
the task a great deal easier in the future. Recognizing that much of
contemporary publishing and film is technically incapable of long-term
endurance leads to innovative technical solutions. The only problems
appear to be of a practical nature, with scientists invited to assist in
improving our capability to store and record. The competing narratives
that inevitably result from such an open approach to memory keeping are
for the future generations to sort out.
Such a picture of abundance and equal opportunity built into the
process of recording our times is of necessity an ideal one. Even in
countries that are technologically advanced and committed to
democracy, financial considerations alone prompt the establishment of
priorities, priorities often informed by the political agendas. In Canada,
for example, the allocation of funding to various ethnic communities as
well as to the central "bank" of Native Canadian artifacts follows from
the relatively recent official sanctioning of multiculturalism as the
country's defining principle. If pornographic movies are indeed part and
parcel of the North American everyday life, I have yet to hear of supreme
efforts to preserve them for posterity on a par with those devoted to early
silent features. The principle of computer storage does not yet extend to
the whole variety of small, alternative presses however interesting their
publications to future historians. In as much as the key institutions
 Memory in Future Tense 105

assigned the task of record keeping remain for the most part publicly
funded, we may safely assume that setting of their mandates will not
leave the political sphere.
What is likely to change, though, with various technological devices
becoming more accessible to the public itself is the impact of privately
produced records. Ironically, just as the public memory keeping extends
in the direction of the everyday, what "little people" themselves select to
pass on resolutely retains the out-of-the-ordinary quality. But that too
may change; one sees more video cameras, for example, used on not so
special occasions. To what extent will the institutional guardians of
collective memory allow the presence of the public's own products, we
simply do not know yet. 5 If the popularity of reality oriented television
shows is any indication, though, it is as consumers that individuals might
ultimately decide.
Once again, some telling lessons might be drawn from the planning
process behind the Canadian Museum of Civilization. The operative
vision of the future visitor is one of a demanding consumer of informa-
tion, a person very much attracted to displays about the past, but highly
impatient with less than entertaining packaging. Allowing for different
degrees of interest in detailed knowledge, for different types of desired
museum experience, and for the differences between Canadian and
foreign visitors, this introduces complexity into the picture yet does not
interfere with the basic premise. In the "global village," people are
expected to be drawn to cultural histories, their own as well as others'.
The current trend of serving the past as a tourist attraction is expected to
continue; in this respect, the museum is in hard competition with theme
parks and Disney's empire and ought to act accordingly, enter marketing.
But the consumer is also expected to demand the museum to retain its
unique status of a "depository of national memory"; indeed, the planners
anticipate an increased interest in the collecting and storing of artifacts
with a design of a special glassed-in "people mover" to allow a closer
look at these behind the scene activities.
Consistent with the projected needs for proper packaging is the
emphasis on the emotional aspects of the museum experience. Beyond
the general recognition that any educational goals are best attained by
combining intellectual and emotional cues to the past, there are specific
procedures for mood-production to be built into the exhibits. With a push
of a button, for example, visitors would be able to recreate the "authentic"
106 Frames of Remembrance

smells or noises of a setting. (In the fall of 1991 when I was there, such
gadgetry was not yet installed, emotional simulation being reduced to
mainly visual effects of site reconstruction of a, by now, traditional
variety.) Introducing live performances and more hands-on activity
displays is to serve a similar purpose of emotional engagement. Intercul-
tural understanding, it is stressed throughout, cannot be produced without
empathy. Appropriately invoking McLuhan 's legacy, the "museum for a
global village" is a multimedia experiment in the engineering of feelings.
In most museums, it is the "aura" of the artifacts themselves that makes
for an emotional impact on visitors. The Canadian planners resolutely
set to break away from such quasi-sacred atmosphere. At the same time,
though, it is the museum-its splendid architecture, its position across
the river from Parliament Hill, its structural elements-that is assigned
the aura-producing task. The entry via Grand Hall, for example, is
described as a "ritual of initiation," with the design of the Hall praised
for the awe-inspiring grandeur.
This vision of the future of the past is thus an interesting mixture.
History becomes a nice place to visit, 6 rendered all the more comfortable
and entertaining with sensory stimulation. But the museum experience
is to be even more special than it is today, a viable alternative to going
on an exhilarating ride in Disneyworld. That at least some history is not
the least bit entertaining remains completely outside the optimistic frame.
Translated into practice, this does mean a celebration of Canada's Native
peoples' heritage without even a hint of the long and troubling history of
their subjugation.
What I found particularly telling in this design "for the global village"
was the recognition of an increasing commercial value of the past.
However one feels about it, I think that students of collective memory
are well advised to take notice here. Beyond the often remarked on appeal
of nostalgia in fashion (or movies), 7 we might be witness to a larger
cultural shift, with profound implications for the vicissitudes of
remembrance. In the advanced, Western world at least, and especially in
North America, the last two decades saw an enormous growth of local
heritage societies and both practical and legal efforts at securing histori-
cal preservation. Genealogy is a fast growing enterprise as well. Many a
popular book, play, movie or television production speaks of the past.
And yes, the tourism industry is increasingly responsive to the demands
 Memory in Future Tense 107

for historically oriented adventures. The past, in short, becomes an

attractive commodity.
There are a number of plausible explanations offered by cultural critics
as well as more casual observers. The one I find perhaps most convincing
points to a shift in visions of the future, from the optimism inherent in
the belief in progress to the uncertainties implicated in questioning, if not
altogether abandoning that belief. Once the idea that "new" is not
automatically "better" takes root in ordinary people's perception of their
lives, it is possible for the "old" to acquire positive appeal. We know that,
historically, in times of rapid and threatening social change, the longing
for old order is almost guaranteed to emerge; the Nazis taught us, too,
that such a longing can be a revolutionary force and perfectly at ease with
modern technology. What makes the situation today rather different from
the previous challenges to the vision of progress, though, is the pervasive-
ness of the questioning, both in political and in social terms.
Politically, seeing progress as a threat or an enemy is no longer
confined to the realm of conservative thinking. The environmental
movement, most noticeably, and the calls for empowerment to women
and minorities more implicitly, all carry the call to reevaluate the relation-
ship between technology and power. Ethical debates, sparked by new
scientific developments, implicate the whole political spectrum as well
in introducing doubt about moral virtues of progress. Such debates-on
euthanasia or reproductive techniques-resonate well beyond the circles
of specialists. The very spread of new technologies for prolonging life,
for example, makes it likely for ordinary men and women to have to face
the dilemmas these pose. Similarly, as more and more people actually
work with computers, they do not need experts to tell them of this being
a mixed blessing. Discussions about the effects of television on our lives
have long left the academic halls to engage families and friends. The
renewed public concern with the quality of education is also a public
phenomenon, however much it involves the specialists' sophisticated
arguments.
It is not that people reject modern technological developments, far
from it; the "new and improved" label still sells. But more and more
people-as parents, patients, workers, commuters-begin to see the
future as problematic. No longer restricted to the intellectuals' formula-
tions, questions about progress acquire an immediate, lived relevance.
108 Frames of Remembrance

Other questions that have been acquiring such direct, lived relevance
to many people in North America and Western Europe are those about
cultural identity, theirs and the Others'. The time of massive demographic
shifts in the ethnic composition of society, coupled with a widening
public debate on their implications is also the time when the ideas of
global economy and polity begin to penetrate everyday concerns (with
unemployment, for example). On both fronts, the need for self-anchor-
ing-on a manageable scale-increases. The local heritage preservation
is perhaps the clearest expression of turning to the past for anchors. More
generally, though, the commodification of history that we have observed
may reflect a less tangible interest in affirming differences against the
sameness brought on by globalization. 8
Finally, the attractive packaging of the past must be seen as the
marketing phenomenon it also is, responsive to the public demand yet
also reinforcing it with the steady supply of goods. It is difficult to say
which comes first, for example, the wish to visit historical reconstruc-
tions or Disney's ample provision of them. History is a virtually limitless
reservoir of things interesting, beautiful, exotic and ours is not the first
age to use the bounty.
What happens to remembrance, though, when it plays in the market
place? On a limited scale, that of identity reinforcement, communal
memory becomes strengthened; there is now both more "infrastructure"
around and a keener interest in the past. Outside of that realm, however,
outside the "realities of the past" firmly attached to their cultural context,
it is a different matter altogether. For optimists, the "global village"
allows for greater understanding of other people's heritage. I tend
towards a more pessimistic view here, seeing the neat and tidy presenta-
tions of (historical) self as allowing us to feel better, to claim we have
gained understanding without having to work at it. To go back to the
Canadian Museum of Civilization for a moment, to the visitors admiring
the beauty of Native Canadian artifacts, I would suggest this is only the
first step towards appreciation of that culture, with no guarantees what-
soever that the next steps be taken.
Cultures, histories, memories are neither all pretty nor all inspiring,
but this is exactly what they tend to become on the market. There may
be nothing wrong with decorating our memory household with bits and
pieces of other people's heritages (unless, of course, we are dealing with
sacred objects), but it should not serve as the certificate of intercultural
 Memory in Future Tense 109

understanding. There is a great deal more involved in learning about and

appreciating the Other than what can be offered on a brief tour.
When the past becomes a nice place to visit-and bring souvenirs
from-and our role becomes that of consumers, certain ways of framing
remembrance thus gain privilege over others. Education-cum-entertain-
ment tends to displace critical thinking, while the beautification process
further removes any troubling spots. The quantitatively larger presence
of historical markers does not spell a qualitative increase in historical
understanding. Memory is no longer a challenge or work to be done;
consumer taste and preferences begin to replace cultural and political
relevance. Ultimately, the attractive packaging may end depriving the
past of its prime power, that of legitimation.
Such a scenario is not yet a reality. Exhibits of Native Canadian and
Native American artifacts, for example, are being contested for their
de-contextualized, sanitized image of history. But the potential, I believe,
is there for history-as-commodity to gain a monopoly position on the
market, restricting the critical approaches to the narrow area of scholar-
ship and art.
Not yet a consumer product,9 but very much an instrument for comfort
and identity anchoring, such appears to be the role assigned to history in
the countries emerging from Soviet domination. It is too early to tell, at
this point, whether the ideal of the future-as-return-to-the-past is a viable
one, in social and political practice. When the Russians dust off the
symbols of their Tsarist grandeur, for example, their neighbours might
not be the least bit impressed. When the Ukrainian government declares,
in 1991, that it is not going to prosecute anyone implicated in the crimes
of the Communist regime-for the sake of societal peace- it is not at all
clear that the victims or the international community would be ready for
striking the whole period off the record. For the once East Germans, a
return to the past may prove most problematic indeed, as even the legacy
of Prussia is not cherished by all. When the Polish leaders decided to
name their newly democratic country the "Third Republic," with the
Second being the 1918-1939 one, there was certainly no universal
acclaim for this wiping out of decades of citizens' experience. In short,
the forging of links to the "good" past by simply bracketing or removing
the "bad" one may not work. That the attempts are even being made
teaches us, though, something important about the memory demolition
110 Frames of Remembrance

power inherent in visions of the future which rest on claims to identity

and continuity.
A countervision, with predictably opposite implications, has begun to
emerge, though. In it, Central and Eastern Europe are defmed precisely
as "post-Communist" societies, societies that cannot make any effective
transition to functioning (capitalist) democracies unless the legacy of
Communist rule is studied and understood. Often explicitly against the
idea of return to the (glorious) past, this is a vision calling for scrupulous
inquiry into the recent times. It appeals to people's sense of fairness, but
also to their direct experience of the difficulties of transition. The
slow-to-change work ethic, for example, is seen as one of the key
problems and one of the key legacies of the Communist regime. The very
immediate challenge of economic renewal is thus linked to a better
appreciation of historical inheritance. The Communist past becomes an
obstacle to overcome, but not to bypass. And from some quarters, such
as the new Left 10 in Poland, come calls for a more balanced assessment
of that past, allowing for a degree of celebration as well.
Whichever vision "wins" in the end, and I expect they will coexist in
conflict for quite some time, the effects on current memory work have
already been profound, a few irreversible. To take a simple illustration,
the decisions as to the fate of secret police records made today define
what history can be written tomorrow. And whether such records are
sealed, destroyed, or catalogued largely depends on how people in charge
see their future-and their past.
If the current developments in the post-Communist world offer an
especially rich data bank for students of memory, the phenomenon itself
is of course not unique. Countries undergoing profound political change,
whether in the wake of a revolution, military defeat or liberation, usually
stake new claims on the future. As they construct or reconstruct their
identities, the past may be reframed on many levels, from giving it less
(or more) importance to picking out useful narratives. And while such
times of transition may not involve a great deal of actual memory
work-there are other, more urgent tasks to attend to-the new visions
of the future can set the parameters of work to be done. Beyond that, too,
beyond the impact on the public management of the past, such new
visions are likely to affect private attitudes as well. It then again becomes
important to explore both forms of framing memories in the future tense.
 Memory in Future Tense 111

For it is not at all certain that shifts in perception introduced "from above"
would be immediately apparent "below."
On a still more general note, it is clear that not all visions of the future
implicate shifts in viewing the past. Even those that have the potential to
do that may remain inactive, as it were, for a variety of social, political-
and pragmatic-reasons. What our discussion suggests is not a "law" of
memory construction whereby the future be given its due. Rather, it offers
another way of seeing the framing of remembrance, useful for those
concrete instances where the future actually matters.

Notes

1. For an historical overview, see Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The
Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1991).
2. Here, Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures. The Poetics and
Politics of Museum Display (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1991) and Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kraemer, and Steven D. Lavine, eds.,
Museums and Communities. The Politics of Public Culture (Washington: Smith-
sonian Institution Press, 1992) offer valuable resources.
3. George F. MacDonald and Stephen Alsford, A Museum for The Global Village:
Canadian Museum of Civilization (Hull: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1989).
4. See also Ada Louise Huxtable, "Inventing American Reality," The New York Review
(Dec. 3, 1992):24-29.
5. The recent growth of highly accessible computer networks takes this question even
further-will there be institutional guardians at all?
6. This idea is not new, of course. See, especially, David Lowenthal, The Past is a
Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
7. See Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: The
Free Press, 1979).
8. It is significant that even on a smaller scale-that of European unification-the
language of opposition is filled with references to local traditions.
9. Rapidly moving there, though, in these hard economic times. Tourists in Moscow
can now purchase medals and other regime paraphernalia; historians can even buy
KGB files.
10. The expression fits awkwardly, but it is also one used by the actors themselves. The
position is shared by some ex-dissidents (including Adam Michnik, now editor-in-
chief of the popular daily Gazeta »yborcza) and some ex-liberal-Communists
(grouped around the weekly Polityka), with support from many lay Catholic
intellectuals. Attitudes to the recent past frequently serve as a political "litmus test"
in an increasingly complex situation.
 PART III
Dynamics of Memory Work
 7

Absences

Considering the vastness of the terrain of social life and how, of

necessity, only limited space can be accorded to remembrance of things
past, when is it useful to speak of "forgetting"? Taking our clues from
memory practitioners, it appears that social forgetting is first and
foremost that absence in collectively shared "reality of the past" that is
recognized as such and deemed important to repair. Efforts to secure
remembrance, so often framed as the work to prevent forgetting, also
lead us in this direction, for it is again in anticipation of an absence that
they are being made. This idea of social forgetting as something noticed
and struggled against rests, of course, on the separation between those
who accept such absent past as a given and those who do not.
To recognize that something is missing from collective memory is to
place oneself at a distance from it; outsiders may have an easier task here,
but it is often up to insiders to construct plausible alternatives to the once
legitimate interpretation of the events. For example, as important as it is
for the international community to scrutinize Germany's record of deal-
ing with the Nazi past, it is the developments within Germany, within its
educational system and cultural institutions, that are ultimately respon-
sible for the structure of collective memory. Similarly, if the events at
Tiananmen Square entered the Western record to a degree unmatched in
the history of oppression in Communist China, this alone cannot guaran-
tee that people in China do not succumb to yet another state-engineered
amnesia; the battle against forgetting must be fought on the internal front
as well.
Attending to an absence-which-ought-not-to-be also rests on a
theoretically crucial, albeit often implicit principle: that which is not
publicly known and spoken about will be socially forgotten. In sharp

115
116 Frames of Remembrance

contrast to the rules governing individual remembering, where we allow

for complex dynamics of unexpressed memories, collective remember-
ing has to be out in the open, as it were. Beyond the experience inscribed
in individuals' memories-and much of shared "realities of the past" lie
beyond-there is a need for records, markers, stones, reminders, the full
information base of remembrance. What this implies is that when speak-
ing of social forgetting, we are best advised to keep psychological or
psychoanalytical categories at bay and to focus, rather, on the social,
political, and cultural factors at work. 1 An absence within collective
memory may be psychologically motivated, of course, but it carries
consequences well beyond individual mind and soul. An absence acts on
people who may have nothing to forget individually as it makes parts of
the past disappear altogether. Thus, to draw again on the German case,
if it is illuminating to explore the psychodynamics of silence on the part
of those who lived through the Nazi period, the result provides only one
ofthe pieces to the picture of presences and absences in today's collective
memory. 2
The idea that when we speak of social forgetting we are speaking of
a noticed absence implies, too, that collective forgetting,just as collective
remembering, has its own history. What, at one point in time, seemed a
perfectly natural lack of attention to details of the past, becomes, at
another point in time, a significant omission. The absence of memory is
just as socially constructed as memory itself, and with an equally strong
intervention of morally as well as ideologically grounded claims to truth. 3
When groups whose experience had long been excluded from societal
record fight against it being "forgotten," they are redefining that ex-
perience from one that did not deserve recording to one that does.
Challenging the power structure of society-and a host of cultural
assumptions-the work done to give historical presence to women, for
example, rests on the initial recognition of a troubling absence. And this
recognition is in no way inherent in the passage of time or the nature of
women, it is a political act.
If noticing an absence in collective memory-and thus framing the
realm of social forgetting-is often done out there in the world, there is
nothing to prevent a lone analyst from coming forward with a critique of
existing ways of remembrance. Indeed, many a work of historical inves-
tigation, by professionals or otherwise, opens with an explicit statement
of purpose, that purpose being to restore to the deserving presence a
 Absences 117

fragment of the past. Once again, it is by giving a public voice to people

once unknown or forgotten that an absence is both recognized and
remedied. For students of collective remembrance, such investigations
pose a challenge, though. Intellectual fashions in the academia and
beyond, the understandable interest in enlarging historical terrain to stake
career claims, the intrinsic appeal of novelty-all may provide a perfectly
reasonable explanation for the effort. To speak of social forgetting we
need more of a consistent pattern and more of a critical scrutiny mass.
We need to be convinced that the now presented fragment of the past
should have been part of collective memory all along. Few works pass
this test. When they do, when they trace how once a shared and significant
experience disappeared from the record, they are most illuminating
indeed. The note of caution remains, however, not to treat all or even
most of the exciting results of historical research as evidence of social
forgetting; what we now deem important or interesting or worthy of
remembrance is not an absolute standard.
The claim that an absence within collective memory is evidence of
social forgetting is a strong claim. There are times when it is also an
analytically counterproductive one, in that it may hide from view the very
dynamics of exclusion one is working to illuminate. In my study of the
place of the Jew in Poland's memory, for example, I opted for the term
"memory void" instead. For as I was analyzing the history of Polish-
Jewish relations, it became increasingly clear that it would be misleading
to speak of forgetting in respect to experience that had been deemed
irrelevant from the start. The nearly complete disappearance of Jewish
heritage from Poland's records (until the early 1980s) had been a sig-
nificant absence, but to account for it demanded moving well beyond the
general notion of forgetting.
At stake here is not terminological accuracy, but rather the different
requirements that analysis of the absences may impose on us. Document-
ing an absence within collective memory is distinct from tracing its
origins and transformations. The first task is important for our under-
standing of the present and the future; the lack of basic resources for
remembrance of certain aspects of the past severely limits, if not
precludes collective remembering. In this sense, finding out what has
been excluded from the record produces more predictively powerful
results than other types of inquiry into the framing process. The dialectic
between public offerings and private feelings and priorities collapses for
118 Frames of Remembrance

but a few who do not need those public resources. (Or, as was the case
in Poland, the socially created memory void around the Jew would be
reinforced by privately held views on the subject.) Strengthened or not
from below, the exclusion from the public record acts more totally than
any inclusion could.
Accounting for the absences is another matter altogether. At times,
explanations can be fairly straightforward, as in the case of political
regimes which declared particular events or people nonexistent and
proceeded to erase all memory traces accordingly. 4 The challenge then
lies with questions about efficacy, for clearly the record of recent past
calls for more intense efforts of silencing the witnesses than one removed
from direct experience. Once outside of the Orwellian world, though,
tracing of an absence may become a formidable task indeed, calling for
an imaginative historical inquiry of its own.
Up until now, I have used the term "absence" in its literal meaning of
something missing. In the limited number of cases, such usage is more
than justified. Soviet history books and other forms of public discourse
about the past have been, until recently, rather packed with omissions. 5
Studies looking at the treatment of the Holocaust in Western textbooks,
too, show a great deal of gaps. 6 When I inspected popular books on Polish
cultural history, the lack of any mention of the Jews (other than as victims
of the Nazis) was glaringly obvious. Yet even in those cases, the idea that
something is missing operates against the background of something else
which is very much there. It is extremely rare to have a complete vacuum
in the record, nor do we ordinarily expect that to apply when thinking
about social forgetting. 7 If the famine during collectivization of the
Ukraine indeed "disappeared," that whole period did not, rather, it
acquired a definite-and positive-picture. If the memory of collabora-
tion with the Nazis has had a rough time in securing public presence in
France, this did not spell a blank over the war times, but rather a struggle
with the "resistance myth. " 8 Indeed, I would argue that most of the time,
when we speak of forgetting, we are speaking of displacement (or
replacement) of one version of the past by another. To use different
imagery, when we set out to listen to historical silences, we are forced to
listen to a great deal of noise.
In 1989, an internationally coordinated effort began to modify the
textual and visual structure of the museum now on the site of the
Auschwitz camp, so as better to represent the identity of mostly Jewish
 Absences 119

victims. Previously, the very word "Jew" was missing from the tablets
commemorating the victims-or the guidebooks used by visitors. Rather,
the people killed by the Nazis in Auschwitz were referred to by their
country of origin, making it virtually impossible to appreciate the camp's
central role in the "Final Solution." What existed, then, was not a void,
but an elaborate "text" effectively silencing the Jewishness of the victims.
Tracing absences immersed in the "infrastructure" of collective
memory is often a demanding task. It begins with-and cannot avoid-a
conviction that the "reality of the past" at hand is at least incomplete, if
not incorrect altogether. Such a conviction may well be at odds with one's
intellectual understanding of the dynamics of remembrance, but without
some, however provisional, sense of the factual base line, a critique of
the material becomes impossible. 9 Recognizing that one is always
making a judgment when studying social forgetting as to what is true and
what is not may give us theoretical discomfort, yet it is not an un-
reasonable price to pay for illuminating a key field where social forces
are played out. For it is the absences within collective memory that can
tell us a great deal about the workings of power and hegemony.
This reasoning is not news to analysts of culture working within a
critical perspective (broadly defined), such as that offered by feminism.
The unmasking of specific absences, as well as inquiries as to the
complex dynamics of silencing women in general are quite explicitly
aimed at "correcting" our understanding of the past just as much as
empowering women in the present. Similarly, when North Americans are
asked to incorporate Native Indians' perspectives into the official histori-
cal canon, the goal is clearly political. Behind the analysis of absences-
and exclusion-lie concerns with the legitimating power of collective
memory.
An example from the other end of analytical-and political-
spectrum proves illuminating here. For the last twenty years or so, the
"revisionist" historians have worked hard to show that the Holocaust
never happened, that it had all been a "hoax" created by Jews to secure
international support for the creation of the state of Israel. The lines of
power are drawn very sharply here, for the argument rests on the notion
of Jewish control of the media and other means of memory production.
To liberate the world from Zionist manipulators, their credibility is first
put in question as Zionists, and then through the use of evidence contrary
to their "truth." 10 In an admittedly rare case of the loud and clear
120 Frames of Remembrance

manufacturing of forgetting, it is the powers-that-were that set to reclaim

their privileged position, apparently exasperated over the losses.
The idea of displacement, of silences "all dressed up in words," helps
to explain how well social forgetting often works. Our cognitive maps
do not easily tolerate void and chaos, so that deleting whole periods of
time from the record would likely produce discomfort or suspicion. In
contrast, providing a plausible account of the past, while excluding even
some key components, is a way of securing that it go unquestioned, at
least until social circumstances drastically change. Thus, more often than
not, when what is being forgotten are morally repugnant deeds, their
absence from the record is more than compensated for by an alternative
and morally comfortable vision. How plausible such an alternative vision
is, how well it can be maintained, seems to depend both on its consistency
with the orienting myths already in place in collective memory-and on
the ability to neutralize the critics. TI1e case of Austria, for example,
where the victimological interpretation of its role in World War II
admirably succeeded, even in the face of the Kurt Waldheim affair, is
instructive on both counts. Forgetting the Nazi past worked well within
the larger vision of the fallen empire, but it could not have been possible
without cooperation from both the United States and the Soviet Union.
Japan, with its minimal acceptance of dwelling on its own criminal record
vis-a-vis the Chinese, relies heavily on the isolationist attitudes to
neutralize criticism from outside. Parallels can be drawn here with
Poland's rejection of its share in moral responsibility for the Holocaust;
the very powerful idea of having been a victim of history in general and
of the Nazis in particular offers comfort, while repeated critiques of
"anti-Polonism," inherent in the Jewish perspective on the past, offers
the out when questioned by Westerners.
On a different scale, it is only recently, with the increasing societal
involvement in matters of ethics in science and technology, that the
not-so-glorious chapters in the history of scientific communities are
being brought to public attention and grudgingly incorporated into the
professional training curricula. The atmosphere of scandal that still
prevails when revelations about Heidegger or de Man reach the media
may have a neutralizing effect of its own, in that the ideal of decency and
neutrality is not disturbed. 11 But more and more people are willing to let
the record show the scope of scientists' responsibility for the perpetuation
of racism-and for the "Final Solution" -or to question their involve-
 Absences 121

ment in the nuclear arms race. 12 At a more intellectual level, too, social
scientists in particular are now being taken to task for "forgetting" about
genocide in their theories and research practice. 13 The picture that is
gradually emerging points to the strength, once again, of an alternative
vision where human beings are seen as rational and scientists are seen as
more virtuous than most, a vision with wide societal support.
If forgetting about the morally troubling aspects of the past may be
drawing additional strength from the widely shared reluctance to dwell
on the negatives, the basic operational principle here is one common to
the work of memory on the less charged terrain as well. That which does
not fit within the established structures of thinking and feeling is very
likely to be excluded from remembrance. And, once again, as such
structures change, so the patterns of presence and absence are subject to
modification.
More and more recent studies of collective remembering and forget-
ting take the form of case by case investigations of just such processes
of change. 14 Recognizing the need to contextualize shifts in meaning
assigned to the past translates into reconstructing the socially, culturally
and politically complex trajectories. This empirically based approach
appears to me as the most reasonable, at least at this stage of analytical
time. For while the ideas developed here, as much as the theoretical roots
of the work of others, suggest particular heuristic strategies, these cannot
substitute for the richness of empirical material. The task, for now, is to
formulate good questions, not abstract answers.
When tracing the dynamics of exclusion, we need to be especially
careful, I would argue, not to close the inquiry by theoretical fiat.
Resolving from the start to focus on the views and attitudes of intellec-
tuals, for example, in recognition of their privileged position as guardians
of collective memory may work in some cases, but not in others. The fact
that a given narrative offered by historians worked to silence X, when
given explanatory power, can effectively obscure the more significant
role played by literature. Countries, communities, politics are not equal
in the positions they assign to different storytellers or in the importance
they grant to remembrance and historical truth. What in one context
represents a significant omission may not do so in another; movies in
North America warrant close analysis in a way that movies in then East
Germany might not.
122 Frames of Remembrance

The study of social forgetting, then, necessitates empirical plausibility

of its theoretical premises. Not only do we need convincing that a
particular absence in collective memory warrants attention, we also
should be persuaded that locating such absence in books rather than
monuments, or, in films rather than parades makes sense. And this is only
the beginning of retracing the process of exclusion, a retracing that is
likely to bring forth a mixture of deliberate choices and tacit acceptance.
Recognizing that absences are often the result of displacement is of
major help in what would otherwise appear as a daunting task. For we
are better equipped, through the tradition of critical inquiry into the social
construction of knowledge, to trace the patterns of remembrance that are
in place. Mapping out both the details of specific narratives and a general
outline of a "structure of sensibility" 15 these narratives fit into goes a long
way towards explaining how alternative visions of the past never came
to be. A student of Canadian history, for example, who ponders why the
experience of radical democracy among the early twentieth-century
farmers did not enter that country's sense of its past, offers a plausible
explanation indeed by focusing on the consistent framing of
"democracy" as involving parties and parliaments. 16 In this case, the idea
of local autonomy can be shown to have been displaced through both the
historians' and politicians' discourse. Similarly, when beginning in the
late 1970s, French intellectuals embarked on a critique of the Left, they
were both documenting a particular kind of social amnesia and the
strengths of the positive vision of progress that had prevailed before. 17
Case analyses such as those are often rooted in an ideological critique
of the dominant interpretation of the past rather than an interest in the
dynamics of exclusion as such. Still, they offer students of collective
memory a great deal of valuable material on the intellectual itinerary of
displacement. Once again, a certain amount of caution is in order, for the
realm of ideas about the past need not be exclusively of such explicit,
formulated nature. I too, when studying the fate of Jewish memory in
Poland, had assigned high priority to the voices of scholars, writers, and
opinion makers. Ultimately, though, I turned to visible markers of Jewish
presence (or the lack thereof) in an effort to account for the children's
virtual ignorance of that chapter in the country's history. 18 The disap-
pearance of material traces could not explain the exclusion of the Jew, it
was more of an indication of the process. But it could help explain how
 Absences 123

effective this forgetting had been, so close, after all, to the times of the
Holocaust.
Although an analysis of displacement of one vision of the past by
another is on heuristically most secure grounds when applied to actual
texts, it can and it often must be extended to "texts" in their most open
meaning. A building that was once a synagogue and now serves as a
warehouse is just as much a site of displacement as a cross placed on
Jewish memorial grounds. The section of Warsaw built on what had been
the ruins of the ghetto, where only a few street names coincide with those
from the past, silences that past just as effectively as the exhibit in the
city museum which excludes any reference to Warsaw's Jews. Moving
to another world, the imagery in The Lone Ranger, where the Wild West
is a nature preserve, helps to forget the conquest of American Indians
very well indeed. 19
If opening one's analysis up to include the varied modes of remem-
bering (and forgetting) is often a necessity, it is not without risks.
Operating within the realm of written discourse, rooted in the long
tradition of historical and sociological inquiry, has the great advantage
of natural limits to our data, be they influential works of scholarship or
literature. Once outside such demarcated terrain, the reservoir of poten-
tially relevant material not only expands exponentially, but offers few
clear clues as to limits or priorities. It may be relatively easy to show,
drawing again on my previous work, the truncated vision of Jewish
tradition as preserved in Polish literature and historiography, a vision
which made references to the most basic of Jewish customs in The Polish
Jewry, a book published in 1982, open to critique for the lack of proper
"translation." It is a different task altogether to demonstrate that such a
truncated vision received support in other areas of collective remember-
ing, from film to local landscapes. Several analytical choices that had to
be made at that stage stemmed less from a general theory of remembrance
and more from a close reading of the particular situation at hand. Some
of the choices had to follow purely pragmatic considerations of the
availability of data. Assigning priority to one form of public discourse
over another was also subject to change when a different type of displace-
ment came into focus; looking at how Polish Jews became identified as
Poles when victims of the Holocaust, I paid special attention to posters
accompanying the many commemorative occasions, for example.
124 Frames of Remembrance

As varied as the forms of public discourse under consideration are,

they still remain just that, forms of public discourse. When tracing an
absence from the "reality of the past" still within experiential reach of a
considerable number of people-as was the case with my analysis-
there are good reasons to expect that the construction of remembrance
would not necessarily draw on public resources. Instead, it is within the
sphere of social tellings, familial tales and the like that much of the texture
of the recent past would be formed. Especially in a country like Poland,
with the Communist regime controlling such a wide range of public
expression, attention had to tum to these other, hardly visible, forms of
social discourse about the past. Yet, however analytically justified, such
a tum would prove problematic indeed. On a very practical level, even
a large team of researchers could not monitor enough of naturally
occurring conversations to gain a fair sense of societal practices. To
instigate talk about the past, while a tried strategy for finding out what
people might think about a given issue, was not a viable alternative here
either. Claude Lanzmann, when filming Shoah in Poland, did exactly that
in various locales his crew visited. 20 The responses he elicited from
Polish peasants and townsfolk were illuminating, but only their reactions
to an intruding foreigner. There was simply no way of telling what they
actually remembered-and forgot-when not prompted, not appearing
before the camera. 21
Some indications of the scope of social forgetting could be found in
the behavioral sphere. With a few notable exceptions, the many markers
of Jewish presence in Poland had been left unattended by the local
residents. When not left to decay, Jewish tombstones would be used as
pavement material, synagogues as warehouses. And, very much unlike
the remembrance of the Polish dead which defied state prohibitions,
honoring the Jewish dead fell strictly within the limits defined by the
official stricture. The absence of mourning was most evident, however,
in the developments immediately following the Holocaust. The returning
survivors were not welcome, to say the very least; some 1500 lost their
lives at the hands of Poles during the first two years after the end of the
war. 22
To the extent that social construction of remembrance relies on spon-
taneous storytelling, the widely shared perception of Jewish subjects as
taboo offered perhaps the strongest support to the idea that the memory
void existing in the public sphere was not being filled with private
 Absences 125

recollections. As a number of writers were breaking the silence in the

early 1980s, they saw themselves as doing exactly that and often com-
mented on the extreme difficulties inherent in talking about things
Jewish. What emerged from their reflections was a generalized picture.
Unlike in the West, where the emphasis would be on speaking about the
Holocaust and the terms of discussion were.-.both intellectually and
theologically sophisticated, Polish commentators told of unease and
emotional charge in the very mention of the word "Jew." Talk, any talk,
about anything related to Jews, was seen as problematic. The language
itself, or rather the connotations long attached to terms such as "Jew" and
"Jewish" presented a formidable barrier to any normalization of dis-
course, both public and private.23
At the same time, the very persistence of the negative meaning of the
word "Jew" did indicate the persistence of another form of talk, of the
mythical identification of Jews with the forces of evil. The displacement
at work here was thus not of the type where one "reality of the past"
precludes another. Rather, the mythical Jew, conveniently adaptable to
any and all historical circumstances, was fmally being challenged by a
host of historically specific real Jews.
What happened in Poland after I completed my study proved morally
unsettling but intellectually illuminating. The vast expanding of public
resources for remembering the Jews did not seem to alter the established
patterns of private tellings. Outside of the small group of concerned
intellectuals, largely responsible for the discussion of Jewish topics in
the first place, the mythical Jew remained secure. During the 1990
electoral campaign for the presidency, the word "Jew" was widely used
as the ultimate of weapons in discrediting one's opponents. Old con-
spiracy theories were revived and well. Star of David, added onto posters
throughout the country, served as the symbol of enemy threat. Street talk,
no longer constrained by the authorities, perpetuated the mythic image.
Collective memory proved resistant indeed to intellectual tinkering.
While the "Poland and the Jew" case may be unique for its complex
web of historical and political circumstances, the lessons that might be
drawn from it point to a general dilemma facing those who are concerned
with social forgetting. Inasmuch as the availability of public memory
resources defines the potential scope of collective remembrance, filling
in the blanks matters. But what appears to matter even more is dislodging
the established patterns of thinking and feeling, patterns responsible for
126 Frames of Remembrance

the gaps in remembrance. Countering an absence with an ever-growing

informational base, in other words, provides only for the possibility of
change within collective memory. The harder task is to make drawing on
these new resources both emotionally and cognitively compelling, or to
create a shared need to remember what had not been remembered before.
That task is harder not only because it requires a solid understanding
of the roots, the history of particular forgetting, but also because what is
to be constructed is much less tangible than knowledge or physical
markers. To justify the new ways of remembering, whether on moral,
intellectual or emotional grounds, is often to undermine some very
cherished cultural values and beliefs. It can also be, as I remarked
previously, an explicitly political undertaking. On all counts, many of the
basic principles guiding collective life may come under attack. If
remembrance tends to maintain social identity and order, working against
forgetting is often a radical challenge to both. As such, it is likely to meet
with resistance and opposition, even when (or perhaps especially when)
the new "infrastructure" of memory is in fact allowed to be constructed.
Our discussion so far, with its heavy emphasis on recognizing, ac-
counting for and ultimately repairing the absences in memory, offers only
one side of the normative picture. Social forgetting, it is high time to note,
can be and frequently is seen as something both needed and desirable.
Beyond the very general idea that too much concern with the past may
be counterproductive for collective well being, there are the more
specific, culturally inscribed, principles that frame forgetting in a positive
way.
Although the idea that we often should "forgive, but not forget"
appears at first as a rule explicitly against forgetting, its practical applica-
tion, both for better and for worse, tends to blur the distinction. When
Vaclav Havel, as the new president of Czechoslovakia, appealed to his
countrymen not to "dig up the dirt" in each other's past, he supported
that appeal with a morally unassailable admission that he too was
responsible for the wrongs of the Communist regime. For the sake of
social peace, Havel argued, people should both recognize their own
responsibility and forgive others. Under the circumstances, Havel's voice
represented reason and morality all at once. Yet at the same time, it was
effectively silencing those who would wish to create a detailed record of
the recent past.
 Absences 127

To forget but not to forgive was the more common strategy in Central
and East European countries leaving Communism behind. Together with
a vast and varied effort at a recovery of memory long silenced by the
regime came the very practical work of eradicating visible traces of the
Communist past from the public sphere. Renaming of streets, squares,
and whole towns would at times mean a return to the original; often,
however, it provided a means simply to replace the now-despised sym-
bolism of the old with references to the alternative historical narrative.
In the decades of the regime's rule, towns and cities grew well beyond
their previous borders, making it necessary to go well beyond revindica-
tion of the past. What was most striking in this deconstruction of memory,
in Poland, for example, was how rapidly the exclusion principle had
come to apply to non-Communist figures. Polish intellectuals, quick to
note the irony of Orwell-in-reverse, started to question the wisdom of
displacing the whole of the country's leftist tradition. They were not able
to stop local initiatives, though, or the visible urgency of putting anything
connected with the idea of socialism behind.
A similar effort to engineer social forgetting could be observed in the
once East Germany. There, however, the voices raised against the prac-
tice appeared to enjoy more popular support. If all the traces of the
country's Communist past were to disappear, the argument went, so
would a base for distinctive collective identity. Concern with the inherent
inequality between the two parts of Germany would thus perhaps work
to prevent any full-scale obliteration of the Communist heritage. 24
Considering the speed with which much of the "infrastructure" of
remembrance was being altered or altogether destroyed by the emergent
democracies, the success of the operation may be very much open to
question. For social forgetting to take root, more than the most visibly
public traces of the past need to disappear. What was made possible by
the undertaking, though, was making it virtually impossible to honor the
now-displaced past. In this respect, the effort in Central and Eastern
Europe is not at all exceptional. For just as much as the call to remember
often rests on the moral principles of justice, the argument not to
remember appeals to our sense of historical fairness. More specifically,
when we are asked not to remember, we are essentially being asked not
to honor or respect; at issue is usually whether a person, a group, or a
movement deserve remembrance.
128 Frames of Remembrance

The call not to remember is rarely heard until an alternative is voiced.

And the strength of such calls seems to depend on the quality of the
honoring to take place. Not surprisingly, controversies erupt more sharp-
ly when stakes are high. Instructive here is the recent record of the
Vatican's declarations of sainthood. The idea that Queen Isabella of
Spain, for example, ought to be so recognized sparked tremendous
negative response from concerned Catholics and Jews alike, seeing any
honor bestowed upon the Inquisition ruler as morally offensive. On a
more limited scale, canonization of Father Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish
priest who sacrificed his life for that of another prisoner in Auschwitz,
came under heavy attack from those familiar with his record as a devoted
antisemite. Within the ideologically opposite sphere, parallels may be
drawn with the late 1980s efforts, in the Soviet Union, to ensure that
Stalin not be honored in any way.
What is objected to in all such cases is both remembering and forget-
ting, remembering in the glorifying mode and forgetting of the morally
repugnant record. Implicit in the objections is a recognition that to grant
honorable remembrance is a very effective way of silencing memory of
the past. There is also a recognition that the more publicly visible symbols
carry greater weight than the historical record provided by scholars. 25
In the realm of interpersonal relationships, forgetting (and forgiving)
others' mistakes is not only a form of common courtesy but often a much
needed basis for present and future success. In the life of societies, similar
principles tend to apply at the overt level of diplomacy and international
politics. Symbolic gestures by leaders, together with the pragmatic
realities of economic and other exchange between the United States and
Japan, for example, secure the politically "correct" measure of remem-
bering the mutually problematic past. The wide acceptance of the idea
that peaceful coexistence among nations requires a certain amount of
forgetting becomes evident at times of controversy. At stake then is not
the principle, but the definition of the "proper amount"; when then
President Ronald Reagan visited Bitburg cemetery, the presence there of
graves of the S.S. led many to protest the crossing of a line.
In a world that suffered many conflicts and great wars in this century,
the international forgetting is a fact of life. Its relationship to social
forgetting within the countries involved remains largely to be explored.
Two forces impacting the vicissitudes of remembrance deserve special
attention, I think. The first is that of allowing, supporting, and encourag-
 Absences 129

ing the construction and maintenance of morally purified narratives, both

ideologically and practically. As mentioned before, the case of Austria
would serve as an analytically fertile ground here. The second is the one
working in the opposite direction, at least potentially, as when interna-
tional pressure places demands on a country to engage in full moral
accounting for the past. Yet while encouraging social forgetting, locally
and on a wider scale, appears to be effective indeed, it is not at all clear
that protests issued from abroad translate into altering the patterns of
remembrance at home, or even that they result in shifts of image
presented to outsiders. Instructive here is the long history of Turkey's
denial of Armenian genocide, in the face of mounting pressures from the
Americans in particular.
The past of other countries, beyond being implicated directly in the
politics of the day, may also at times serve as a rich reservoir of
ideological resources (and obstacles) and thus be subject to altogether
different demands than those of expediency. For many Western intellec-
tuals, ever since the Russian Revolution, to take a position on the history
of the Soviet Union would mean difficult ideological choices. The
forgetting of Stalinist crimes, as much as their rediscovery in the 1970s
in France, for example, was structured within a complex internal web of
political theory and practice and cannot be understood solely by reference
to the international scene.26
The perspectives adopted on the West's colonial past, on the French
Revolution, on the industrialization in England, on the Greek civilization,
to name but the most prominent examples, have been historically and
may still be today indicative of ideological positions. What is constructed
then is less a "reality of the past" but rather a set of tools for politically
charged intellectual debates.
The fact that ideological traditions do cross international borders adds
an important dimension to our analysis of social forgetting. Very much
strengthened is my earlier call for a case-by-case empirical approach, as
the complexity of the picture increases. For the most part removed from
the direct experience of people doing the remembering, memory now
becomes a much more open terrain, open to construction as well as
demolition. Distance, literally and historically, when combined with a
high degree of ideological relevance, offers great impetus to creative
memory work, and especially to mythological production. Forgetting the
130 Frames of Remembrance

ideologically troubling past is all too common. It would be analytically

wise to bring it under more intense scrutiny.
To suggest, as I do here, that the dynamic of collective amnesia may
be prominently implicated in international affairs is to be reminded, once
again, of the limited usefulness of purely psychological terms of analysis.
It is also to reinforce the point that whether seen as an absence-which-
ought-not-to-be or a proper reflection of current societal priorities, any
disappeared past can indeed reappear. Political, ideological as well as
broadly cultural forces play a role here, and it is with those forces that a
better understanding of social forgetting begins.

Notes

1. For an introductory survey of the analytical perspectives, see La memoire et l 'oubli.

Special issue of Communications, 49 (Paris: Seuil, 1989).
2. See, especially, Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes, eds., Germans & Jews since the
Holocaust: The Changing Situation in West Germany (New York: Holmes & Meier
Publishers, 1986).
3. For an informative, comparative case study, see Judith Miller, One, by One, by One:
Facing the Holocaust (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990).
4. See, for example, Jonathan Mirsky, "The Party's Secrets," The New York Review
(March 25, 1993):57-64.
5. For an insightful study of the beginnings of remedial work, seeR. W. Davies, Soviet
History in the Gorbachev Revolution (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1989).
6. See, for example, Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); Gerd Korman, "Silence in the
American Textbooks," Yad Vashem Studies VII (1970):183-203; Centre de
documentation juive contemporaine, L 'enseignement de Ia Choa. Comment les
manuels d'histoire present-ils /'extermination des Juifs au cours de Ia deu.xibne
guerre modiale? (Paris, 1982).
7. The untold story of the Gypsy victims of the Nazi genocide comes close; see
Gabrielle 'l)'rnauer, "Gypsies and the Holocaust: A Bibliography and Introductory
Essay," Montreallnstitutefor Genocide Studies (May 1991) 2nd ed.
8. See, especially, Gerard Namer, Batailles pour Ia memoire: La commemoration en
France 1944-1982 (Paris: Papyrus, 1983).
9. Exemplifying the challenge well is Michael Schudson, Watergate in American
Memory: How We Remember, Forget and Reconstruct the Past (New York: Basic
Books, 1992).
10. Implicated here are ideas from both the Right and the Left; see Alain Finkielkraut,
L'avenird'une negation: Reflection sur Ia question du genocide (Paris: Seuil, 1982).
11. See, for example, Thomas Sheehan, "A Normal Nazi," The New York Review
(January 14, 1993):30-35, and the long exchange of letters which followed.
12. Robert Jay Lifton has been one of the most outspoken critics here; see, especially,
Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of
Genocide (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1986).
 Absences 131

13. See Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassolm, The History and Sociology of Genocide:
Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
14. One of the best and most comprehensive is Henri Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome:
History and Memory in France since 1944, translated by Arthur Goldhammer
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).
15. The term is Raymond Williams's. More broadly, my approach owes a great deal to
an early exposure to his ideas on culture.
16. Mike McConkey, The Political Culture of the Agrarian Radicals: A Canadian
Adventure in Democracy (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, McGill University, 1990).
17. Most explicitly in Bernard-Henri Levy, L'ideologie fram;aise (Paris: Editions
Grasset & Fasquelle, 1981).
18. For an American parallel, see Jonathan Boyarin, Storm from Paradise: The Politics
ofJewish Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).
19. Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck, translated by
David Kunzle (New York: International General, 1984).
20. For a transcript, see Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust-
The Complete Text of the Film (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985).
21. For further discussion, in general terms, of the problems facing oral historians, see
James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.:
Blackwell, 1992).
22. See Lucjan Dobroszycki, "Restoring Jewish Life in Post-War Poland," Soviet
Jewish Affairs 2 (1973):58-72. I am indebted to Alina Cala, a Polish etlmog-
rapher/historian, for sharing with me the results of her research in the early 1980s.
Interviews with peasants in the southeastern regions not only conftrmed the prior
estimates of how widespread the killings of Jews have been, but also showed that
both at the time and decades later, such action was perceived as perfectly "normal."
See Alina Cala, Wizerunek Zyda w polskiej kulturze ludowej (Warszawa:
Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 1992).
23. For more discussion, see lwona Irwin-Zarecka, "Problematizing the 'Jewish
Problem'," Polin: A Journal of Polish-Jewish Studies 4 (1989):281-95.
24. That Rosa Luxemburg became a subject of both a popular movie and public
recognition is a telling example here.
25. For a case study ofthis dynamic, see Norma Field, In the Realm ofa Dying Emperor:
A Portrait ofJapan at Century's End (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991).
26. See Bernard Legendre, Le stalinisme franc; a is: Qui a dit quai? (1944-1956) (Paris:
Seuil, 1980).
 8

Memory Projects

The work that goes into the construction and maintenance of collective
memory becomes especially visible on projects designed to give
presence to the previously absent or silenced past. Looking closer at a
few such projects allows us then to understand better the basic dynamics
of remembrance. Compressing the otherwise diluted effort (in time and
social practice), memory projects call our attention to the fact that there
is nothing automatic about entering the public record or being remem-
bered. And while this is not theoretical news, what memory projects do
is to bring the idea into the foreground of public discourse with rarely
matched clarity. Both through explicit "editorials" and unabashed crea-
tion of new symbolic resources, many expose the presence of social and
political control over memory to the public-at-large. In that sense, their
importance goes beyond the immediate results at hand, as memory
projects reclaim more than a past, they reclaim the power to define it.
One of the more intensive and extensive memory projects is that
prompted by the feminist critique of patriarchy. Starting with the idea
that women had been largely excluded from the historical record and
extending this idea to the still-to-be record of contemporary life, feminist
writers and scholars set out first to document women's experiences,
women's perspectives, and women's roles. Whether the field be art,
literature, music, science, or politics, the task is to retrieve what had been
lost, to reevaluate what had been present. The scope of this work is
naturally quite immense, and the results too varied to be reducible to
recordkeeping. Methodological, ideological, and political disputes
abound. But what has emerged so far, particularly in North America, is
a new set of resources for thinking about the past, both in general and in
many specific areas.

133
134 Frames of Remembrance

Continuously augmented, this new set is still largely the specialist's

territory. Used within the movement, and discussed primarily within
respective disciplines (though, characteristically, the works often cross
academic lines), products of this memory project are still very slowly
absorbed within the intellectual canon, let alone the popular one. In a
sense, what has been provided by the numerous investigations is the
informational base on which collective memory can be restructured. The
struggle now is to find ways best to secure the restructuring.
On this issue, too, disagreements abound. For some scholars and
activists, the growth and strengthening of "women's studies" within the
academia gains priority, for the time being. Others worry about the effects
of a "ghettoization" of knowledge such arrangements encourage and risk
perpetuating. If new generations are to be capable of seeing human
heritage as inclusive of men and women, it is not enough, the argument
goes, to teach those already accepting the idea. Indeed, it is often pointed
out, confining the work to a small sector within university education is
close to a guarantee that change be painstakingly slow. 1 On the other
hand, the sheer amount of work stiii to be done in the information
gathering mode alone may call for just such a concentration.
The feminist memory project is only a part, of course, of a larger
project for change, thus affecting and affected by many an internal
debate. Its core raison d'etre-to retrieve women's history-resonates
with the idea that women's experience is different from men's. The
results of inquiries, though, can speak to a strict separation of men and
women just as they can confirm that the dividing line is a cultural
construct. In effect, one can probe the past to strengthen whichever
philosophical line one chooses. And while this definitely adds to lively
debates, such pliability of the reclaimed past also poses a major chailenge
to the much needed popularizing of ideas. The newly constructed
"realities of the past" risk being embroiled in too complex an ideological
battle for the media to handle, and for the public to make sense of.2
Another inherent risk in a politically motivated memory project,
especially one as closely intertwined with the developing of coilective
identity, is that of sanitizing the records of the past for the sake of greater
inspirational value. Mentioning in passing, for example, that a great
advocate of the women's right to abortion, Margaret Sanger, was also in
favor of "racial improvement" through eugenics does little for meeting
the moral challenge this combination presents. 3 In this respect, though,
 Memory Projects 135

the disagreements within the movement may work to counterbalance the

emphasis on good points; "inspirational value" being itself relative to the
professed views allows for the full moral complexity eventually to
emerge. 4
At this stage, the feminist memory project is for the most part still
laying the groundwork for remembrance. With a few exceptions, 5 attend-
ing to the past has taken the path of inquiry rather than commemoration.
Exhibits, art work, drama, and independent film and video productions
remain minorities within the predominantly verbal discourse. Symbolic
resources are thus skewed, as it were, in the direction of facts and ideas.
Even if emotional content is not lacking, emphasis is on knowing about
the past, on securing its presence within the informational environment
more than the visual one.
Considering this emphasis on the construction of new narratives (and
recovery of the ones lost), it is understandable that a major battle ground
here be school curricula. Educational practice, more than any other form
of public discourse, is called upon to make the products of the feminist
memory project widely available. It is still much too early to tell how
successful such a strategy can be. The very scope of the restructuring of
collective memory that is ultimately aimed for, let alone the opposition
to such massive changes, makes this a long-term project indeed. In the
short term, though, the already posed challenge to the official canon of
tellings, the emphasis on "breaking the silence" as well as that on directly
giving a voice to the disenfranchised, have helped-and been helped
by-changing the texture of public discourse about the past and present.
The battle over school curricula, to take but the most visible example,
extends in North America to issues of proper historical credit for the
minorities, as do debates on the viability of black or Asian studies.
Women's speaking out on abuse within the family has prompted a much
wider public acknowledgment of the realities of violence and incest And
the strong current of lesbian concerns joins with the critical recovery of
the homosexual experience in the struggle for human rights.
It will be up to historians to trace the numerous linkages here, on the
level of ideas as well as institutional practices. What is especially
interesting for students of collective memory are the parallels of uneasy
accommodation between the particular and the universal concerns. A
memory project that is an integral part to strategies of empowerment has
to do two things. It has to build up a storehouse of symbolic resources
136 Frames of Remembrance

(and inspirational materials) for the group at hand. At the same time, these
same resources are deemed generally important and to be included in the
official (hegemonic) cannon. The first task calls for memory work that
is relatively straightforward-inquiry into the past in search of the
"missing pieces." The second task demands editorial work, as it were,
which can prove a great deal more problematic. At issue is persuading
the majority, and especially the socially powerful, that a restructuring of
collective memory should be taking place. Here, appeals to the need for
group identity have to be toned down, if not displaced by appeals to
universal values-justice, truth, individual rights. Power, which is at the
heart of the matter, frequently may acquire the more attractive packaging
of enrichment for all.
Power can, of course, take the center stage in a memory project, but
this appears much more likely to happen when the work involves many
different sectors ofthe civil society in confrontation with the extant (and
to be overthrown) political system. Preservation of the records, especially
the records of oppression, now acquires the very direct value of an
instrument in struggle including, but not limited to, retribution. Cruel
regimes have a great deal of respect for remembrance, as seen in the
elaborate methods used to destroy whatever does not conform to the
official line. And people living with those regimes very much share in
that respect, knowing as they do that even the smallest act of the "wrong"
commemoration can be dangerous. 6 In such tense circumstances,
memory projects are still about specific knowing of the past, but there is
also the great stress on symbolic (and ideally public) expression of
remembrance.
Mothers of the "disappeared" in Argentina understood this dynamic
very well indeed; theirs was not only a struggle for preserving the
memory of their children, but a direct, and ultimately successful, chal-
lenge to the power of the regime. With the policy of glasnost in the Soviet
Union, the once fully underground efforts to record the state crimes and
to commemorate its victims acquired a threatening public presence.
There, the unleashed memory projects covered a massive historical
territory, well beyond that of martyrology (and responsibility). 7 The
struggle, in some cases, was for dignity of those who perished, physically
and symbolically. In the case of the organization Pamyat (Memory), 8 it
has been unabashedly a struggle for power, with all the myth production
this can imply. The political stakes are very high, whatever the emphasis.
 Memory Projects 137

For it is through a recovery of the past-communal, institutional, nation-

al-that the civil society is to emerge.
In Poland, a country where the process began much earlier, and where
glasnost had been an implicit practice rather than an explicit policy since
the mid-1970s, this creative capacity of collective memory was openly
recognized by all political actors. Translating into a myriad of small
projects, efforts to reconstruct civil society took, once again, the mixed
form of documenting the officially to-be-forgotten and symbolic expres-
sion of remembrance through public ritual. 9 By the mid-1980s, the
regime effectively acquiesced to the presence of alternative "realities of
the past," from underground publications to graves of the victims. In
1989, the Communist Party retreated altogether, unable even to pretend
legitimacy.
All this is not to say that memory projects alone are responsible for
overthrowing powerful regimes. Indeed, it is only once the tight grip of
control over public discourse is somewhat loosened that oppositional
memory work intensifies and has the potential to succeed. It is to
recognize, though, that the energy, if not the risks, involved in the
recording and remembering the forbidden past has tremendous rallying
force. It is also to recognize that in situations where public debate is not
open, reclaiming control over one's history is a major step indeed.
In the cases discussed so far, where a memory project presents a major
challenge to the very structure of power built into public discourse, much
of the attention of the participants and analysts alike is deservedly turned
to the contents of new offerings. Facts, figures, dates, all the "hard stuff'
of collective memory are the main focus, with the symbolic texture of
remembrance often allowed spontaneously to emerge. Public gestures of
commemoration, while of great importance as testimony to the struggle
are not themselves subject to critical deliberation. Internal debates, which
almost inevitably accompany the memory work in progress, tend to
center on the interpretation of the newly constructed fragments of the
past rather than ways to remember. In that sense, such memory projects
are not self-conscious, however much the participants recognize the
importance of what they are doing. Actively attending to the past, in other
words, need not mean critically attending to remembrance.
Not all memory projects share these qualities. Indeed, most conducted
on a smaller scale do noL For what is usually involved in the very concrete
undertakings to secure remembrance is the construction, often in the
138 Frames of Remembrance

literal sense, of memory markers, where issues of form are as demanding

of attention as those of content. Securing remembrance means symboli-
cally representing a given "reality of the past" all the while calling upon
the public to pay attention. 10 This can be done with textual means, but
words alone may not be adequate. A space, a museum, a monument would
be the chosen sites to focus on. And these, by their very nature of a
symbolic shorthand, demand careful deliberation on each detail, from the
location to material to shape.
Matters of content-and the political implication of its public
presence-do not become irrelevant, far from it. But they are now
translated, as it were, into minute questions of fonn. Some of this
translation-and the debates that follow-may become public
knowledge; the dispute over the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington
would be a case in point. 11 When this happens, the framing of
remembrance acquires a great deal of additional (explicit) force. At times,
effort is made to prevent that, to let the finished product "speak for
itself' -and to cover the sharp controversies of the design stage. The
Holocaust Memorial Museum, also in Washington, where planning took
several years and several emotionally charged turns would exemplify the
latter. 12
The high public visibility, as well as the complexity of the events
themselves, account for much of the self-conscious attention to detail
here. But even on memory projects that are not as problematic, yet still
focused on securing remembrance, great care may be taken in the
selecting and framing of materials at hand. Consideration is given to what
we may broadly term "pedagogical" value, especially when the final
product is to be actually used in educational practice. 13 To evoke
remembrance among people who know little and feel even less about an
event is a challenge. One of the ways in which this challenge can be
met-often tried in schools or small communities-is to involve
everyone in the project. Asking children to gather information-or adults
to reminisce-while providing critical guidance and commentary brings
the events emotionally closer, thus augmenting the potential for
remembrance beyond learning lessons. Incorporating local history in
projects dealing with such big entities as World War II or Vietnam allows
for the need for personal relevance of the past if it is to be remembered.
Drawing in of nonspecialists, if at times a deliberate strategy adopted
by the specialists, may occur a lot earlier and more directly. Indeed, it is
 Memory Projects 139

often with nonspecialists that memory projects begin; it was the Vietnam
veterans themselves who initiated work on what would become The Wall,
to take but one example. In this respect, memory projects are quite unique
within the general area of production of collective memory-they wel-
come participation from ordinary people, at least in principle. The
elements of personal relevance, personal interest (and, frequently, per-
sonal memory) acquire positive value, in notable contrast to work by
historians or even journalists. The securing of public remembrance
cannot, however, be a private matter, on a small or a large scale. Expert
knowledge, expert artistry are not sufficient either; indeed, at times they
are not applied at all. What is required is public support, in the very
concrete sense of funding and in the broader terms of rules governing
public discourse and public space. Individual initiative and work can
carry a memory project in its ftrst stages, but without some institutional
back-up, the results could not become available beyond a small circle of
those directly involved. 14
The need for public support can extend participation in a memory
project rather widely, not in the direct sense of working together, but in
the equally consequential terms of sponsorship and the power of critique
it entails. Projects that require considerable expenditures and/or access
to the media face a particularly acute demand to justify their own
existence to potential supporters, and then to the public at large. Opposi-
tional memories are put at an immediate disadvantage here, both
ideologically and practically. 15 But projects that do find willing sponsors
readily are also not problem free. Political loyalties, commercial con-
siderations, desire to appeal to wider audience, all can result in effective
self-censorship on the part of memory workers.
What the demand for garnering public acceptance strengthens is the
already considerable explicitness of the very process of framing
remembrance. Because memory projects operate on new and often
controversial terrain, and because the remembrance they aim to secure
is rarely "natural" for the community at hand, the work involved contains
building up of a rationale for itself. 16 On a memory project I studied
closely in the early 1980s-Poland's extensive invitation for the Jew to
inhabit the country's heritage-where remembering was indeed running
counter to the long history of ignorance and indifference, the emphasis
on the reasons for remembrance for a long time equalled that of the actual
construction of it. And while this may be an extreme case, a particularly
140 Frames of Remembrance

strong challenge to the established patterns of collective memory, the

very need for self-justification is by no means unique. North American
debates about school curricula, we mentioned earlier, are also primarily
about rationale for change and secondarily about the logistics. In the
context of Central and Eastern Europe, the work of the recovery of
memory proceeds amidst disputes about the social and political conse-
quences; not everyone agrees even on the basic principle that freedom
of historical inquiry is a key component of a democratic process. When
a group of citizens in a small town in Germany decides to document the
town's history, including the Nazi period, they cannot just call upon local
pride; the hard work of persuasive justification begins.
The fact that memory projects remind us not to take remembrance for
granted brings them analytically close to conflicts where a given histori-
cal "truth" is being contested. In both instances, the otherwise quiet
presence of the past is being disturbed, as it were, for all to see. Yet while
confrontations over the content provide us with implicit clues about the
role of collective memory, the rationales heard from project workers offer
the invaluable direct testimony to the actors' own understanding. An
analyst cannot, of course, treat such testimony at face value; precisely
because public support is so often at stake, an element of "packaging"
would be importantly present. In that sense, what project workers tell us
is also what they perceive to be the justifiable reason for their efforts,
thus shedding light on the wider societal dynamics of remembrance. In
Canada, for example, numerous proposals to document (and teach)
ethnic history are "sold" to government funding agencies in the name of
multiculturalism, an increasingly accepted proposition. Thirty years ago,
the same idea would have had to be presented in terms of integration and
assimilation to gamer support. Project workers, then and now, might be
doing exactly the same thing; societal climate changed.
The articulation of memory's significance by those working on its
construction must also be analytically detached from the meanings
acquired by the product. However explicit is the framing of remembrance
at the point of origin, as it were, there are no guarantees that a text, a
monument, an exhibit would be "read" as intended, even within the
immediate constituency of the project. 17 Over time, too, the "editorial"
statements tend to move far into the background of the memory markers
themselves, further facilitating a multiplicity of interpretations. In the
end, the importance of the newly constructed "infrastructure" for
 Memory Projects 141

remembrance may be in its very existence, allowing for different uses to

emerge, compete, conflict.
Memory projects are thus best to be studied as they happen, for this is
when we are given the rare opportunity to observe the framing process.
Once in place, products of such concerted efforts to affect the structure
of collective memory come to coexist with many other symbolic resour-
ces, which would have their own histories. Even though, by their very
nature, memory projects provide resources that had not been available
before, filling in the gaps, as it were, it would be a mistake to see them
as operating in a symbolic vacuum. Indeed, the absence within collective
memory they seek to counteract can be itself a powerful grid for inter-
preting the past. In other cases, reclaiming control over history works to
displace the previously established canon of tellings, a still more concrete
structure of remembrance. Most significantly, perhaps, the very realm of
the new symbolic resources may extend well beyond the project's
territory. Once the public's attention is directed towards a given aspect
of the past, and once certain key works are completed by the project's
members, it is often like a signal to others that a topic is "in." From the
point of view of potential restructuring of collective memory, this un-
doubtedly spells success. On the other hand, with the much broader
participation in the construction work, the original goals of a project, its
clear direction and statements of purpose may no longer apply to all of
the production in place. 18 Especially on large and long-term memory
projects, it then becomes difficult to separate the deliberate from the
incidental.
Beyond this element of an unplanned growth, many memory projects
have an in-built mechanism for including works not originally created
on the project itself, thus for reframing of extant resources. Indeed,
though we may be giving most credit to the production of the new,
bringing back the old under a different tag of relevance, as it were, is
often equally important. 19 Renaming of a public square, renovating a
house of prayer turned to a warehouse, displaying once hidden
photographs-these are but few of the forms taken by reworking of the
"old stuff." To build meaningful linkages with the past might be virtually
impossible without some of this reincorporation taking place, however
difficult it is at times.
The need to use materials created in quite different historical (and
symbolic) context may lead to problems, though. When the Royal
142 Frames of Remembrance

Ontario Museum in Toronto put together an exhibition devoted to the

history of Canadian missionary work in Africa, local black activists
staged weeks of long protests at the door, accusing the curators of racism.
At issue, in particular, were several photographs, shot by the missionaries
and now on display together with the artifacts they had brought home.
For black activists, these pictures of the "primitive Africans" were just
that; museum officials argued, in tum, that the photographs accurately
depicted the attitudes of the time. The dispute reached the mass media,
where it became linked with other ongoing controversies, not so much
about the sophistication of audiences (which was appealed to by the
museum advocates), but about the "property rights" to meaning produc-
tion. At issue now would be the propriety of majority cultural institutions
and artists to talk about the experience of blacks, Native Canadians ...
and women. Mutually exclusive claims to the past were staked as well.
Appropriating the history of the Other in the name of Canada's diversity
proved highly offensive to the Other, or more specifically, to writers and
artists struggling to be heard in their authentic voices. 20
Not resolved, not resolvable, what this dispute brought into the
foreground is a key dilemma for memory projects aiming far beyond the
symbolic vocabulary of the target audience. When the task is to include
the Other among the referents of collective remembrance, how is one to
balance demands for authenticity with the threat of Otherness remaining
on the outside? And, who should be doing the memory work-those once
excluded, or those once excluding?
As we have seen, the issues are far from settled on the feminist project,
where the call for inclusion came from the Other. Settlement is also not
likely in the Canadian case, where the initiative to reflect the country's
multicultural fabric in the tellings about the past is more evenly split
between old elites and applicant Others.
It is instructive, in this context, to look at a case where the questions
have been answered, if somewhat by default, in favor of the exotic. In
Poland, where the recovery of the Jewish heritage has been virtually
exclusively an undertaking by the Polish hosts, the Jew proved most
appealing when most foreign. Among the tremendous variety of cultural
productions devoted to things Jewish, the ones finding the broadest
audience and most popular appeal are renditions of very Jewish (and
mysterious) Jewishness. Relying largely on imports-works by I. B.
Singer, for example21 -does not guarantee authenticity in reading, but it
 Memory Projects 143

does introduce a whole new and exotic lexicon. The idea of enrichment
thus appears to translate well into remembrance of the Other as a colorful
figure, interesting because of his Otherness. At the same time, though,
the voice of the Jew is heard highly selectively, as any expression of anger
or criticism of the hosts would be toned down, if not rejected altogether.
In that way, the "Jewish memory project" in Poland remains within the
established pattern of a presentation of self while presenting the Other.
As North Americans struggle with their (increasingly recognized)
cultural diversity, we can expect several more rediscovery-of-heritage
projects to enter the public agenda. At this point, it is not at all clear
whether preserving the difference of the Other(s) would win over a search
for common historical threads. For students of collective memory, this
is a fertile ground indeed for investigating what the past is meant to do,
and what it actually does.

Notes

1. Another broader issue enters the debate as well-that of the nature of feminist
scholarship and pedagogy, or the degree of change called for.
2. To take but one example: in Ontario, the 1992 proposed changes in employment
legislation to secure equity for women brought forth only a very limited public
discussion. The issue is important, but few journalists are equipped to explain what
exactly is at stake.
3. In one of the standard texts, Josephine Donovan, Feminist Theory: The Intellectual
Traditions of American Feminism (New York: Ungar, 1986), 52, the reference is
only to a "limited population growth."
4. Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987) is exemplary in this regard.
I am grateful to Claudia Koonz for providing me with reviews of her book as well
as her insights on this point.
5. On December 6, 1989, Marc Lepine gunned down fourteen female engineering
students at the Universite de Montreal, explicitly aiming at "feminists." Now
referred to as the "Montreal massacre," the event is widely commemorated in
Canada with vigils, marches, and other events.
6. See, for example, Fang Lizhi, "The Chinese Amnesia," The New York Review
(September 27, 1990):30-31.
7. For a useful summary, see David Remnick, "Dead Souls," The New York Review
(December 19, 1991):72-81.
8. Parnyat, with its advocacy for honoring Stalin and strong currents of antisemitism,
had a large degree of (implicit) support from the opponents of the reforms.
9. See, especially, Bronislaw Baczko, Les lmaginaires sociaux. Memoirs et espoirs
collectifs (Paris: Payot, 1984).
10. For a rich analysis of this process, see Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhall, lwo
Jirna: Monuments, Memories, and the American Hero (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1991).
144 Frames of Remembrance

11. See Monumental Histories. A special issue of Representations 35, Summer 1991.
12. See Judith Miller, One, by One, by One: Facing the Holocaust (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1990).
13. See, especially, Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The
Poetics and Politics ofMuseum Display (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1991).
14. See, especially, Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory. The Transformation
of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991).
15. See Between Memory and History, edited by Marie-Noelle Bourquet, Lucette
Valensi and Nathan Wachtel, History and Anthropology 2, 2 (October 1986).
16. For interesting examples, mostly emphasizing the goal of "healing," see Thomas
Butler, ed., Memory: History, Culture and the Mind (Oxford and New York: Basil
Blackwell, 1989).
17. For an excellent case study, see James E. Young, "The Biography of a Memorial
Icon: Nathan Rapaport's Warsaw Ghetto Monument," Representations 26 (Spring
1989):69-107.
18. For example, even though the recovery of Poland's Jewish heritage began on the
note of cultural pluralism, the work actually produced over the last ten years is
heavily skewed towards memory of the Holocaust in general, and personal tes-
timony in particular.
19. See, especially, David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985).
20. This particular debate in 1990 coincided with attempts to redraw the rules for
funding cultural projects by Canada Council (a federal agency); the issue remains
on the media agenda.
21. With the now privatised publishing industry, keeping track ofbestsellers has become
a common practice. Singer's works have been consistently in the top 10 (on the lists
compiled by Polityka).
 9

Truth Claims

Among many social scientists today, it is not altogether fashionable

to speak of "truth." The underlying theme, after all, in so much of inquiry
is that of construction-of facts, ideas, images, and values. This inquiry
into the dynamics of collective memory is, in many ways, equally
concerned with how "the past" comes to be for us what it is. And yet,
precisely because common sense tells us that what did not happen cannot
be remembered (though it can be talked about otherwise), there are no
easy analytical escapes from dealing with truth. Indeed, no matter how
much equality we may grant-in principle-to different interpretations
of the same events, there is always a point at which both scholars and
ordinary folk start to cry foul. Academic reviews and popular media may
pay homage to the philosophical doubts as to the status of reality, but in
their practices, and especially in their arguments about quality, the
premise of knowable truth persists. Collective memory in particular may
be increasingly recognized as both an all too selective and mediated
version of the past (often when contrasted with findings of historical
research), but that does not absolve it from judgments of accuracy. The
essentially mythical structure of remembrance, the often all-too-obvious
ideological bents, the emotional charge of symbols and disputes, in short,
the expected departures from objective (and dry) facts do not make
collective memory into a terrain of pure fiction. What they do do is
necessitate a closer look at their own truth claims. For in order to
understand how collective memory works, we must appreciate how it is
framed in relation to its base-collective experience.
Memory work, the work of giving order and meaning to the past, is
not an analytically homogeneous process. At times, in the inquiries by
investigative reporters, memory work may follow the principles of

145
146 Frames of Remembrance

scientific inquiry. At other times, as when ordinary and not-so-ordinary

people write up their biographies, the work involved is that of storytell-
ing. The truth to life of the television series Roots is of mythological
quality. The emotional power of the Vietnam War Memorial is a work of
art. And the crowds' cheering at the taking down of monuments to
Communist heroes in Poland is an apt symbol of that country's rejection
of the imposed vision of history.
To students of collective memory that very diversity within its con-
struction is a challenge. It may not always be recognized as such, since
the researchers tend to focus on internally consistent "chunks" of the
diversified whole of remembrance, but it becomes immediately apparent
when the emphasis shifts to "chunks" of experience. To understand how
the West Germans have coped with their "unmasterable past," one cannot
(ideally) ignore the movies nor the stores selling Nazi memorabilia when
studying school curricula. 1 When I studied the invitation extended to the
Jew to inhabit Poland's memory, the only way to make sensible sense of
it was to look at exhibitions as well as press polemics, at new books as
well as the restored old buildings, at the memorial ceremonies as well as
the production of Fiddler on the Roof The serious, the mundane, the
sacred, the dramatic, the exotic, and yes, the commercial-these are all
facets of remembrance. And before inquiring into what they tell us about
the past (and the present), it is helpful to recognize their distinct ways of
framing-while-communicating ideas and feelings.
At issue here are primarily the differences in "readings" engendered
by particular forms of memory work. 2 Allowing for all the other factors
which would influence how a person responds to a cluster of meanings-
personal experience, knowledge, values, ideals-there remain often
sharp differences in the potential response to those meanings inherent in
their mode of presentation. Indeed, the very scope of the meanings
presented depends largely on their locale, be it a parade or an academic
treaty.
To say this is not to restate McLuhan's "the medium is the message,"
for in looking at collective memory, contents matter more than the forms.
It is to recognize that the analysis of public discourse in general must
allow for the mixing of standards and standard procedures applied to the
production of meaning. Whether we like it or not, comparing apples and
oranges is often a necessity when tracing cultural trends. The task here
 Truth Claims 147

is to clarify what kinds of apples and what kinds of oranges are we

throwing in together when speaking of collective memory.
The fact, remarked on earlier, that people do get upset when
remembrance of the past is not faithful to that past (as they see it) may
serve as a useful point of departure. Clearly, the negative reaction among
some Vietnam War veterans to the plan of only listing the dead on The
Wall is not quite the same as Habermas 's outrage at the historians' attempt
to relativize Nazi crimes. At the heart of both, though, is the now
out-of-fashion idea of the "essence" of the historical reality. Practically
all memory work, from the sophisticated writings by academics to the
simple gesture of laying flowers at the likely, but unidentified, site of our
loved ones' death is judged, however implicitly, as to its "fit" with the
past experience. 3
When memory work takes on an oppositional thrust, such as when the
past is recovered or revised against the established canons, that work's
very raison d'etre lies in its claims to a better, more complete or more
honest truth. When a country's official memory runs counter to the
memory shared by many of its people (the case in Eastern Europe during
the postwar decades), truth becomes less of an analytical category and
more of a rallying point for the struggle for freedom. In both of these
cases, at the center of claimed or reclaimed truth about the past are hard
historical facts-events, people, their actions, their writings. In other
words, in large-scale efforts to secure remembrance of once forgotten or
once-to-be forgotten elements of collective experience, the operational
meaning of truth is that of our common sense notion of "this really
happened."
Among the different people who engage in memory work, historians
are often granted a special status as those with the strongest claims to the
truth of "this really happened" kind. Despite the long tradition of debates
within historiography, and the by now considerable evidence to the
contrary from sociologists of science, ordinary people in democratic
societies do not ordinarily question the historian's authority to proclaim
truth. Only when confronted with a blatant misuse of that authority-
usually, though, framed as something which happens in undemocratic
societies-are nonspecialists ready to become suspicious. (The situation
is, of course, radically different for those living in places where history
is ruled by ideological fiat.) For all the strength of the feminist critique
of established history, the repair work being undertaken is again a
148 Frames of Remembrance

province of historians. Methodological disputes as well as epistemologi-

cal challenges that may pervade academic writings do not easily enter
public discourse proper. The popular perception of historical scholars as
"experts" cannot be discounted just because we as academics may know
better. In this day and age of mass media especially, where reliance on
expert knowledge both legitimates the contents of television productions
and strengthens the very legitimacy of the experts, students of collective
memory would be well advised to overcome their own doubts and take
these truth claims seriously.
The role of historians as advisors to media producers or to commis-
sions in charge of public commemorative works and events, when
coupled with the growing interest in nonfiction that gives at least some
scholars an unprecedented amount of public exposure, provide for an
extensive contribution of historical research to the construction of col-
lective memory. 4 Where that contribution is most crucial, however, is
within the educational system proper. Once again, allowing for the fact
that many children and young adults may not have taken history courses
or may have little interest in them, the contents of school curricula remain
the key transmission device for expert historical knowledge. And if the
study of literature can reveal more about the past than the dry descriptions
of facts, the students learn early to appreciate the difference between
subjective account and objective truth, or that historians provide the
latter. The very format of textbooks, including those used at the university
level, sends a clear message of facticity. Pupils may be encouraged to
reflect or assess different explanations, but in the end, they should all
know "what really happened."
How important the school is within the whole socialization package
as far as making sense of the past is concerned is a matter for empirical
investigation. It is indeed regrettable that otherwise informative studies
of the curricula, most often concerned with their "inadequate treatment
of ... , "pay so little attention to the context in which the schools function.
Recognizing that our understanding of the actual impact of history
lessons is not adequate, I would suggest, though, that their unique
position to provide young people with authorized truths about the past
makes their study a crucial element of inquiries about collective memory.
Just as the actual importance of history textbooks is a matter for
investigation, so is the broader question of the role played by historians
in the construction of their country's sense of the past. Beyond the easily
 Truth Claims 149

apparent differences between the respect for historians in a democratic

society and the suspicions they engender as guardians of official
doctrines, there are also the more subtle distinctions informed by cultural
attitudes. In a country like France, where intellectual debates are not
restricted to academics and where reading is still a highly regarded
activity, printed discussion of what might otherwise appear as obscure
points of an historical record gains both a wider audience and greater
resonance than in the United States, for example. 5 Historians in Germany,
traditionally regarded as providers of national pride, and still struggling
with such high orders, receive a hearing among their people that reflects
that. 6 In the countries of Eastern Europe, where at the beginning of the
decade so many historical works were being rejected and their authors
issued public summons of accountability, the future of the profession
may depend on its ability to reclaim a "pure" scientific status. 7 In short,
what is expected of historians at a given time in a given place may well
define their impact on public discourse at large.
Finally, the authority of the historians' claims to truth is very much
dependent on the proximity of the collective experience itself. Recent
history, after all, is not just a subject of study; it is a part of individual
biographies as well. If ordinary people are rarely equipped to challenge
the expert views of the Roman Empire, they are both perfectly capable
and often highly motivated to question the wisdom of academic defmi-
tion of their own past. The potential for disagreement can account not
only for active counterproduction of remembrance, but is also at source
of the withdrawing of credit from professional truth-makers.
And yet, when that happens, when historians are not trusted as
purveyors of collective past, the very standard of historical truth is, if
anything, reinforced. For when people dispute the definitions of "what
really happened" based on their own knowledge of the events, they are
empiricists par excellence. 8 (I am, I should stress, referring here to
collectively posed challenges, not to individual's rejection of authorized
truth.) In other words, whether a particular account of the past produced
by historians is countered by other historians or by ordinary people who
"were there," the right to enter collective memory is equally based on the
claim to objective truth.
When we add journalists and a whole variety of nonhistorically trained
intellectuals to the already substantial contingent of professional and lay
defenders of historical truth, the work of remembrance may indeed
150 Frames of Remembrance

appear as modeled on, if not actually ruled by scientific procedures. Yet

if we think of collective memory as providing us with resources for
making sense of the past, establishing the base line of "what really
happened" is only that, establishing the base line. To make sense is to
give meaning to the facts and figures, to assign significance to some
events and people over others, to see patterns over time, to define
deviations. Making sense of a specific experience is also a process of
evaluation, primarily in moral terms, of its place in the universal human
drama. Finally, it is a process of emotional classification, as it were, of
attaching feelings from within a wide range of those involved in
remembrance not only to ideas about the past, but most importantly, to
places, objects, and images which serve as memory markers. 9
A powerful monument such as the Vietnam War Memorial in
Washington does not "tell a story" of the war; what it does do exception-
ally well is to evoke feelings, and to offer a site for often very personal
reckoning with a shared trauma. Its claim to truth-which was dis-
puted-rests on its ability to symbolize the essence of complex historical
reality. Openly framing remembrance, The Wall gives mourning for the
young who died precedence over honoring the fight itself; its very
(belated) presence and its locale add to the sense it is asking Americans
to make of their country's involvement in Vietnam.
Collective memory would be much impoverished if it could not reside
in physically distinct spaces-cemeteries, memorials, monuments, but
also buildings and structures from the times long gone. Indeed, the care
so often taken by countries and communities to preserve as well as
construct such memory markers points to a widely shared recognition
that our link with the past has to be supported and maintained in ways
which give it permanency. These memory markers, though, are also
special, at times approaching the status of sacred places. 10 Set apart from
the flow of everyday life, memorial structures in particular are set up for
the enactment of rituals, both private and collective. Whether a prayer,
laying of flowers or minute of silence, the burning of candles or an
elaborate parade, gestures of remembrance might look awkward indeed
outside of these special places. Often associated with special occasions
as well, the acts of commemorating the past symbolize that past just as
much as they symbolize our sense of obligation. Through their very
presence, memory markers call upon us. And through their particular
forms, they frame the symbolic texture of our remembering. 11
 Truth Claims 151

Unlike historical accounts of what happened, which ask us to learn

and to understand, physical memory markers demand attention, action
and feeling. They mark particular collective experiences as important,
all the while crystallizing the particulars of the past into symbols.
Sometimes, these symbols serve as closures in that they come to possess
a definitive meaning. At other times, the range of possible readings is
much wider, if never completely open. However we may judge such
symbols in aesthetic terms, they work as art does. And their claims to
truth are very much like those staked by art-of representing the true
meaning of human experience.
Monuments cannot lie, of course, in the same ways that historians can.
Yet if repair work is now undertaken in Auschwitz to render the camp
museum more truthful to the realities of Jewish extermination, it is indeed
in recognition that the symbolic absence of Jews was a lie. It is also in
recognition of the primary importance of memory markers as sites
soliciting remembrance and not just making it possible. In other words,
among all the varied forms of public discourse about the past, it is the
memory markers that most actively engage remembrance.
If historians' works and physical memory markers are taken as two
extreme ends of a continuum, much of what informs and forms our sense
of the past can be found inbetween. Public storytelling of the contem-
porary variety through television and film, novels, poems, biographies,
autobiographies, theater productions, and commemoration
ceremonies-all may mix, in a variety of ways, claims to speak of "what
really happened" with claims to capture the true meaning of the past. 12
The very presence of an event or a person among matters publicly
discussed is often the first step towards entering collective memory; after
all, media coverage of today rapidly becomes a form of instantaneous
memory construction for tomorrow's sake. And even if with the passage
of time, not all and not even most of important stories of yesterday are
actually remembered, the degree of popular exposure being no guarantee
for posterity, the very principles behind that exposure can tell us a great
deal about the dynamics of remembrance as well. For the framing of
stories as dramatic, newsworthy, significant or just plain interesting
applies to the present as well as the past; indeed, in the increasingly
crowded market of ideas and images, the demands placed on the "old
stuff' to justify its relevance to contemporary audiences are high. If
historians can often pursue subjects because, like Mt. Everest, they are
152 Frames of Remembrance

there, a film producer searching for funds to support yet another project
on Vietnam has no such leeway. On the other hand, if the restoration of
a synagogue in the east part of Berlin merits to be done simply to secure
remembrance, the complexity of the narrative in Lanzmann's Shoah
filmed for the very same reason, immediately raises the issue of contents.
Claiming our attention and claiming to be a faithful rendition of the
past, memory works in this large area combining popular culture and art
mix varied narrative strategies, ideas, and emotions. Considering the
great diversity offorms found here, it would be unwise to proceed further
with any generalizations. It is possible, though, to look closer and more
systematically at the predominantly few strategies used to claim a "fit"
with past experience.
Let us begin with the type of memory work that relies heavily on the
claims to factual truth, this time, however, of a subjective kind-eyewit-
ness accounts. From records compiled at the time of the events to
autobiographical writings composed decades later, the "raw" quality of
the narratives is what gives them strength. For collective memory to rely
on such personal memories is an unusual occurrence, though. The
expected partiality (in both meanings of the term) of such accounts makes
them suspect to those searching for objective truth; the often ordinary
background of the people writing them lessens the interest their stories
might generate beyond their small communities of memory.
These two rules, working jointly against individual construction of
collective memory, do become suspended, as it were, with regard to
extraordinary experiences. Most notably, in this century, the reception of
writings from the Holocaust and writings by the survivors represents a
case of bracketing intellectual doubt in favor of the obligation to bear
witness. Other projects in oral history, while not faced with the same
traumatic covenant to record the experience of ordinary people, follow
a similar trust in the value of individual witness. 13 At times originated by
researchers and oftentimes edited for publication, the testimonies by
people who "were there" still retain their key appeal-speaking to us in
voices so close to our own. Their claims to truth are those of authenticity.
Authenticity is also a claim, if not a mark of many artistic repre-
sentations of the past. And if having been there is not technically a
requirement for creating a true rendition of the experience, the authority
of an artist is definitely greater when there exists a biographical connec-
tion. Contrary to historians, who rarely receive extra credit if any credit
 Truth Claims 153

at alP 4 for describing events they actually witnessed, novelists, poets,

painters or filmmakers who draw on their own memories tend to gain in
credibility, at times irrespective of their aesthetic accomplishments. 15
Whether recounting actual events or fictionalizing the account better to
capture their meaning, the artist-as-witness is perhaps the most effective
of all memory workers. The unique combination of the art's power to
evoke feelings, to build empathy, with the "empirical" claim to authen-
ticity frames remembrance in the greatest intellectual and emotional
depth, as it were. And when such combination is used, as it often is, to
speak of the ultimate good and evil, the call upon us to remember is
complete.
It is not an accident that the artistic bearing of witness has become so
prominent in our century, and especially in its latter half. Beyond the
developments internal to visual arts and literature, history itself
(im)posed tremendous challenges on memory work. The world wars, the
gulag, the "Final Solution," the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Vietnam, Cambodia-this is an unprecedented series of traumas to
absorb. What is more, these traumas all implicate, to a greater or lesser
extent, a host of peoples. Indeed, at times these are traumas implicating
the very ideas of humanity and civilization. To weave such experiences
into the fabric of collective memory is both more difficult and more
compelling of a task than ever before.
Of all the great traumas of the twentieth century, none more than the
Holocaust challenged our ability to understand and to remember. And
just as memories of ordinary people receive a special recognition here,
so the other rules of historical credibility shift away from the usual
standards, allowing the artist-as-witness to claim an unprecedented de-
gree of authority. As much as some historians call for normalizing the
scholarship in this area, others still share with the nonspecialists a certain
humility in face of experience that can never be fully comprehended (see
chapter 2). Survivors and only survivors can judge the authenticity of
accounts. Among them, artists are in a privileged position only in that
they can also convey what such authenticity implies in ways which are
intellectually and aesthetically rigorous.
Tracing the public itinerary of some of the best known artist -survivors,
it becomes apparent that with time "bearing witness" translates into
active guardianship of truth; it is as if the criteria of authenticity which
first emerged from the challenge of recording one's experience gradually
154 Frames of Remembrance

gain in authority as the ultimate standards for assessing memory work in

general. Elie Wiesel, Saul Friedlander, a Polish Jewish writer Henryk
Grynberg-all have not only described what happened to them and their
loved ones, but went on to defend the memory of the Holocaust from
abuse and distortion. And if they are joined in the latter task by a wide
array of memory workers who are not survivors, it is still to them that
we listen most respectfully.
Is it possible for artists who did not live through the traumatic
experience they depict to command the same authority? Yes, but it is also
a great deal more difficult. Unlike the ordinary human drama, descent
into Hell is not a subject or material one works with for the sake of Art. 16
And even with the best of intentions and the greatest of talent, artists
remain open to charges of inauthenticity. Theirs, after all, is neither the
authority of scholarship nor that of direct experience. At times, it is the
power of artistic vision that in and of itself serves as a claim to truth;
Coppola's Apocalypse Now, drawing on Conrad's Heart of Darkness,
exemplifies this approach. At other times, the artist becomes essentially
a transmitter for voices of witnesses, however much his vision impacts
on the whole, as in Lanzmann 's Shoah. Most frequently, perhaps, there
is a mixture of fictional order and factual elements working to create a
credible sense of the past. But credible for whom?
If the success of the television series Holocaust can teach us anything,
it is that the lack of historical authenticity, as defined by survivors and
academic experts, has little if any impact on how the audiences judge the
work's credibility. 17 And while this is a major issue for all concerned with
preserving the memory of the Holocaust, students of remembrance are
perhaps better advised to accept the situation and proceed from there,
proceed with questions about how certain stories rather than others come
to form ideas and images of the past.
The authority of the storyteller, as we have seen, provides only a partial
answer here. The essential component of the answer, it seems, is the story
itself. A "good story," in the parlance of television producers, has a much
better chance of entering collective memory-in this age of television
productions-than a narrative devoid of drama. And a "good story" is
usually the one where the protagonists are at once universally human and
historically concrete, where their actions can be understood without the
need to delve too deeply into contextual complexity. What this implies
is a certain mythical consistency within the offerings of popular
 Truth Claims 155

storytellers. Whether the subject is American black history or the extraor-

dinary life of Raoul Wallenberg, World War II or the saga of the
Kennedys, the basic structure of the story remains remarkably similar.
Watched by millions, television miniseries such as Roots or War and
Remembrance draw on a small set of mythic principles, themes that
resonate with well-established ways in which our culture helps us to
make sense of ourselves and our world. 18 At the same time, these are
narratives that often explicitly claim to be historically accurate, even or
especially if the story as such is fiction. This is a powerful combination
indeed, of the direct empirical base and the appealing packaging.
Being both a mass medium and one which coexists with the very
ordinary doings of our daily lives, television rarely frames its program-
ming as a special time for remembrance. Most often, stories about the
past are presented as interesting and worth knowing about, a form of
education-through-entertainment. And the response from viewers indeed
indicates that for many people, television offers the main, if not the only
information they have about a great number of historical events. The
framing process here is at its most basic, then: exposure.
Beyond telling good stories, television, however, has the capacity to
frame remembrance in a much more direct fashion. In its news and
current affairs programming-a source of choice for the majority of
North Americans when trying to keep up with what happens in the
world-a considerable amount of air time is devoted to constructing
patterns into which one should fit today's occurrences. And, with con-
siderable regularity, events from the past are recalled for their own sake
as well in a virtually infinite series of anniversaries. In 1988, it was 1968
which was "making the rounds" across news outlets. In 1989, the fiftieth
anniversary of the outbreak of World War II prompted a massive
coverage for war-related topics. In 1989 as well, the end of a decade
became an occasion for various forms of "looking back," whereby a
multitude of events would be ordered and prioritized.
Whether used to contextualize a current news item, or on its own
terms, the past here acquires a very definite structure of relevance. Time
for the presentation is severely limited. Good visuals often set the
direction for the verbal commentary. The result is a highly selective (but
not random) "primer" on history.
As with school curricula, the actual impact of such television-made
history lessons is a matter for empirical investigation. 19 It is also an open
156 Frames of Remembrance

question as to what extent television (and newsprint media) would be

recognized by the public as a purveyor of objective truth. The role
television plays in different countries depends on a number of factors,
from political to economic to cultural. Definitions of a "good story" also
vary. Having said that, I do think that a better understanding of how
television frames remembrance is the first order of priority for students
of the present and future of memory construction.
In as much as television, at least in North America, has overtaken other
producers of public discourse in the sheer numbers of people being
reached, and, as some critics would argue, 20 changed the very quality of
that public discourse, it is still within the older forms of storytelling that
we find essential clues to how collective memory is constructed.
Television did not invent the mythic structure of narratives, it borrows
them from drama, literature and its already indebted cousin, film.
Television also did not invent the rule that pictures are worth more than
a thousand words; photography is now more than 150 years old, and it,
in tum, has borrowed from painting. The claims to balance and objec-
tivity in television reporting developed on a model of newsprint jour-
nalism, as did those to influence on public opinion. And the sense of what
constitutes a "good story" about the past is the one shared by virtually
all popular media, including that which is the oldest-the oral tradition
of storytelling. In short, to inquire into how television frames
remembrance calls for using a host of critical approaches. At the same
time, when one is focusing, as we are now, on the capacity of memory
work to claim historical accuracy, it must be recognized that television
productions enjoy a highly privileged position. Apart from the overtly
fictional treatment of the past, television presents us with reality-based
drama, docudrama and document where the strength of writing, visuals,
and faithfulness to detail all combine. It is as if television in its many
borrowings favored those which make "this is how it happened" sound
trueY
Among the other media, only documentary film has similar
capabilities. Documentary films, though, are rarely successful enough to
warrant wide distribution. Still, some become a standard element within
the educational system, thus gaining a great deal of additional legitimacy.
Some, even if initially shown to small audiences, become much discussed
events; Ophuls's The Sorrow and the Pity and Lanzmann's Shoah ex-
emplify the potential resonance of controversial memory works. 22 The
 Truth Claims 157

key word here is "controversial," for in contrast to television productions

(at least in commercially run systems), documentary films can and often
do adopt a stance bound to offend. Their claims to historical truth are
then bound to be critically scrutinized on a par with those made by
historians. 23 In aiming to remind and to teach, while rarely if ever to
entertain, these documentary films combine in an almost perfect balance
the two distinct frames of remembrance-an account of the past and a
marker, a locale.
Films like Shoah or The Sorrow and the Pity do more than that, though.
For they are also, in their different ways, meditations on the very process
of remembering. The certain self-consciousness about memory work one
is doing, which they share with films using purely fictional elements such
as Heimat or Syberberg's Our Hitler, brings them onto a much wider
terrain of memory works par excellence. Poets, writers, visual artists,
through their art give meaning to the past while calling our attention to
the act of remembering. In contrast to accounts and stories about the past
where that past is at the center stage, we are now asked to reflect about
ourselves, our own ability and willingness to look back. Whether directly
interwoven within the contents of a poem or a novel, or achieved through
more formal means, this demand for reflection frames remembrance as
fragile, problematic and needed. Rather than telling us that the past is
knowable and known, it is pointing first to the artist and then to us as
people who must work to create it.
Considering what I have said earlier about our common sense inclina-
tion to treat the past as something "there" not to be tampered with,
memory work that calls attention to the work involved in remembrance
may appear as an overly intellectual, alien type. Sometimes it is. Most
often, though, as work explicitly undertaken to provide a bridge between
the past, the present, and the future, its focus on difficulty as well as
necessity of remembering is an accurate reflection of our modem condi-
tion. It is not a coincidence that so much of the self-reflective memory
work represents an effort to approach the Holocaust, the trauma of
ultimate challenge. Whether literally or metaphorically created by the
children of survivors, pictures of the past gain authenticity here only by
reference to memory itself. In other words, when confronted with a
legacy so painful to accept and yet impossible to shed, when struggling
with all the ambiguities of remembrance, claiming to speak of historical
truth is not enough. The search for meaning of the trauma must remain
158 Frames of Remembrance

in the foreground, open to our view, as it were, and opening, in turn, the
possibility of empathy through remembering. 24
Memory work reflecting on itself is not, of course, limited to the legacy
of the Holocaust. A great deal of autobiographical materials, written as
well as filmic, share in the recognition of remembrance as tenuous,
problematic, yet necessary. Yet if we may readily accept doubts about
"the" meaning of events voiced by individuals, it is only when we
collectively have difficulty in remembering that we grant the status of
truth to accounts emphasizing questions and doubts. 25
If works of artistic representation of the past generally call for certain
feelings towards that past, the self-reflective ones make a much more
direct statement in guiding our ways of remembering. In that sense, they
come close to the effect of special presence engendered by monuments
as well as commemorative rituals. No longer just a source of ideas,
images, and sentiments about the past, with memory at the very center
of the work, however tenuously proscribed, all these memory works ask
us to remember.
What emerges, then, from this broad examination of the building
blocks used in the construction of collective memory is a continuum
between knowing and acting, where our sentiments towards the past
move from those of absorbing its meaning to those involved in active
remembering. At one end, entry into memory is guarded by principles of
scientific investigation; at the other, it is secured by powers of perfor-
mance. And inbetween lies a vast area of storytelling claiming our
attention by virtue of the quality and the significance of the story itself.
The ideal of "truth" with which we began this inquiry, the sense that
memory should be faithful to the actual past felt especially by those
fighting with distortions, is also a combination of cognitive, emotional,
and moral imperatives. What enters collective memory must of necessity
represent only a fraction of "what really happened." Yet claims to factual
accuracy carry only limited authority in the selection process. The
fragments of the past that acquire permanent public presence are those
judged worthy of remembering, as well as worthy of knowing about.

Notes

1. See, especially, Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and

Death, translated from French by Thomas Weyr (New York: Harper and Row, 1984).
 Truth Claims 159

2. A good starting point here is Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).
3. For a fascinating look at how "essence" can win over "truth," see Karal Ann Marling
and John Wetenhall, lwo lima: Monuments, Memories, and the American Hero
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).
4. For self-reflection, see David Thelen, ed., Memory and American History
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990).
5. See, especially, Henri Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome. History and Memory in France
since 1944, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1991).
6. See Charles S. Meier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German
National Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
7. For a study of the transition point, seeR. W. Davies, Soviet History in the Gorbachev
Revolution (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989).
8. See, especially, Barbie Zelizer, Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the
Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1992).
9. For a more general discussion of the interplay between ideas and sentiments, see
Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of
Myth, Ritual, and Classification (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1989).
10. See Betty Rogers Rubenstein, "The Shape of Memory: Some Problems in Modem
Memorial Art," in Remembering for the Future: Jews and Christians During and
After the Holocaust (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988), 1790-98.
11. See, for example, James Young, "The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials
and Meaning," in Remembering for the Future: Jews and Christians During and
After the Holocaust (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988), 1799-1812.
12. For an excellent analysis extending the work of transmitting memory beyond public
storytelling, see Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory: How We
Remember, Forget and Reconstruct the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
13. See, for example, Neil M. Cowan and Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Our Parents' Lives:
The Americanization of Eastern European Jews (New York: Basic Books, Inc.,
1989).
14. Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939-1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt,
trans. from the Hebrew by Ina Friedman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1982) is a striking example-with the author remaining silent about his own
experiential knowledge of the events he describes, though, it could be argued, it is
that knowledge which matters most.
15. Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird illustrates this dynamic. As a child Holocaust
survivor, the writer would be granted credit for imagery approaching a pornography
of horror in ways difficult to conceive if a non-survivor was involved.
16. For example, the failure (despite their commercial success) of both the novel and
the film Sophie :S Choice stems largely from treating Auschwitz on a par with erotic
fantasies.
See, especially, Alan L. Berger, "La Shoa dans Ia litterature americaine: temoins,
non-temoins et faux-temoins," Pardes 9-10(1989):73-93.
17. See Judith E. Doneson, The Holocaust in American Film (Philadelphia: The Jewish
Publication Society, 1987).
18. For a comparative/historical perspective, see, especially, James Fentress, and Chris
Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992).
160 Frames of Remembrance

19. See, for example, Kurt Lang and Gladys Engel Lang, "Collective Memory and the
News," Communication 11(1989):123-39.
20. For one of the sharpest critiques, see Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death:
Public Discourse in the Age ofTelevision (New York: Viking Penguin Books, 1986).
21. With the introduction, in 1993, of television movies which went into production
while the events were still unfolding (on the bombing of the World Trade Center
and the standoff in Waco, Texas), we seem to have crossed an important line.
22. Forfurtherdiscussion,seeHenriRousso, The JlichySyndrome: HistoryandMemory
in France since 1944, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1991).
23. I am grateful to Terry Copp for providing me with the transcripts of the Canadian
Senate 1992 hearings into the merits of the CBC The Valour and the Horror, the
much debated production about Canada's participation in World War II.
24. A most telling example of this genre must be the comic book, Art Spiegelman, Maus:
A Survivor's Tale (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991).
25. See, especially, Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins ofMemory
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991).
 10
Instant Memory

Against the cluttered flow of everyday life-and the even more

cluttered information environment-certain moments stand out, defined
as deserving to be remembered. These are the events that enter private
and public records on the spot, increasingly with the help of audiovisual
technology. The "instant memory" so produced need not endure, as a
change in context renders the original into a different experience al-
together. On the other hand, the passage of time itself may make the "as
it happened" record more precious, more important as a direct testimony.
Whatever the ultimate fate of "instant memory," its construction deserves
our analytical attention. For it is one of the prime sites to observe the
interplay between the quality of experience itself, the production of a
record, and remembrance. It is also where claims to truth receive most
credit.
A few days ago, my son celebrated his fifth birthday. This time, we
decided on a big party for his and our friends, complete with favors, hats,
balloons, and the cake. All went well; everyone enjoyed the picnic and I
also managed to capture some of these special moments on video.
Pictures, too, were taken during the blowing out of the birthday candles.
And, in a week or so, I should be able to write a little memory note about
this and other events of the last few months, as I have been doing since
Joshua was born.
That whole day, from the morning presents to the unusually late
goodnight, was meant to be memorable. The festivities, while not staged
for the camera, invited filming in a way that an ordinary day does not.
At the same time, my experience with writing those memory notes is
such that they, more than any visual record, can best convey the joys and
trials of Joshua's growing up. Reading one after some months frequently

161
162 Frames of Remembrance

brings back not just the moments, but the whole texture (and chronology)
of the rapid development, otherwise easily lost in the midst of the new.
There are some key lessons in this family tale. First, that trying to
secure remembrance takes work, but it is work of two different kinds.
There is the emotional and practical investment in creating a special time,
separated from the ordinary living, a time that would have memorable
enough qualities to "register" in our minds. Many occasions may be
socially designated to serve the purpose: birthdays, weddings, gradua-
tions. Others can be crafted by the individuals themselves as they define
markers in their lives. The moments can be quite small in the overall
scheme of things-or quite big-but they all share that distinct intensity
of awareness, the felt desire to remember, that moves the experience
immediately beyond the moment itself.
The other type of work is of a still more practical nature, as it involves
often an elaborate technical means to create a record. Special occasions
may hold a privileged position here, in that they almost automatically
become recorded. In some cases, indeed, it is difficult to disengage the
experience and the record; one need only reflect on the enormous care
and expense granted to wedding photography (and video). But the
not-so-special times may prompt the recording work as well, especially
when we know they would not be possible to repeat. Children, by the
very nature of their not staying children, receive particular attention.
Holidays away from home, let alone expensive trips to exotic locations,
would be another prime time for picture-taking and diary-writing, as well
as souvenir-buying. For some people, of course, the very act of living is
worthy of preservation in its forever changing form, through writing or
pictures.
All these mnemonic devices are used in recognition of the frailty of
human memory. But their role is rarely, if ever, limited to that of
reproduction. Even the most sophisticated technology of film and video,
allowing for direct documenting of events as they happen, is highly
selective in focus and thus transformative of meaning. Writing, though
sometimes used for purely factual recordkeeping, is ever more selective
just as it is capable of assigning the meaning to the experience being
described. An audiotape stands somewhere in between, since it can be
used to record as well as to narrate. The medium of "instant memory"
matters, even when it is only used as an aid to our cognitive capacities. 1
 Instant Memory 163

(As we will discuss later, its significance grows exponentially when it is

applied on its own.)
The active tending to the present so that it be remembered does affect
the experience itself, but such effect can only endure (and rarely com-
pletely does) for the participants. The introduction of recording techni-
ques, on the other hand, has, at least potentially, long lasting
consequences reaching well beyond the actors themselves. Once the
record is made, it can move around, as it were, both in time and in space.
Old family photographs, though generally kept within the family, can
become part of a museum exhibit. Diaries, private as they are, may
decades or centuries later be used by historians. Home movies, too, are
likely to become valuable resources for future accounts of life in
American suburbs, for example. In short, "instant memory," once moved
outside the individual mind, can and often does become public property,
providing us with some essential raw material for constructing "realities
of the past." And as historians continue to enlarge the scope of history to
include the ordinariness of life, we might indeed expect more of such
transfers from the private to the public sphere to occur.
So far, our family tale led us in the understandably skewed direction
of remembering the joyful, the pleasant, the special. But if indeed our
urge to create "instant memory" applies mostly on such bright terrain,
the definition of "special" may at times acquire an opposite, sombre, or
altogether tragic tone. Numerous reports we have from the Holocaust
testify, both by their presence and in explicit ways, to the deeply felt
obligation to record the traumatic experiences. 2 In the Warsaw ghetto,
efforts to gather (and hide) materials for posterity were indeed organized
as a key part of the resistance. Doctors, faced with hunger-related disease
and dying on an unprecedented scale, wrote down what they perceived
as invaluable scientific data-the horrific detail of the limits of human
endurance. Several people, both public figures and not, kept diaries,
under the most demanding of circumstances. And several survivors saw
their very survival in terms of a sacred duty to remember those who died.
The commandment "to record" was itself a sacred one, rooted in the
Jewish tradition. Fraught with dangers, it was also a direct response to
the Nazis' concerted effort to erase all possible traces of their crimes, and
to erase the memory of the whole people. There was then a real sense
(and as the future has shown, a justifiable fear) that unless a record be
made, the experience of camps and ghettos would move into oblivion.
164 Frames of Remembrance

At the time, many a report was indeed not believed, only strengthening
the conviction that witness be given? Those reports that were destined
for the outside world were, of course, also a desperate cry for help. But
a great deal more of the bearing of witness was done without such hope
for immediate results, indeed, with often only a slight hope that the record
would itself survive. The duty to memory-to universal memory-
prevailed.
Survivors themselves cannot forget. They can choose silence, but they
cannot forget. In that, they are joined by others who have been through
personal or collective traumas-people who are forced to remember. The
experience was not of their making, but it cannot be unmade, it cannot,
with the best of efforts, be left unattended. It can, however, remain
enclosed within the individual's memory. Here, it takes work to make
such memory enter even the very private record, let alone the public one.
Moments that are not memorable but rather impossible-to-forget place
their own special demands on remembrance. The sense of sacred duty
felt by many Jews during the Holocaust provided for a strong counter-
force to the urge to forget. In other cases, different principles need to be
evoked for people to share and record their trauma. A victim of child
abuse, for example, who years later sets out to write about the experience,
may be motivated by the desire to help others. A Vietnam war veteran
who talks to college students feels he, too, can help, both to educate and
to secure remembrance.
Because of the emotional intensity, and the pain associated with such
traumatic memories, it is often that we conceive of the dynamics of
remembrance involved here in psychological (or therapeutic) terms. And
yet, the sharing of those memories cannot be detached, at whatever level
of analysis, from its social context. Even within the family, attending to
a traumatic past is not a purely individual matter. For example, Holocaust
survivors who came to North America often sheltered their children in
silence, while those who stayed in Poland were much more likely to talk.
Why? In part, at least, because in Poland, where virtually every family
suffered tragic losses during the Nazi (and Soviet) occupation, the Jews'
experience was included in collective mouming. 4 In North America, by
contrast, survivors were an isolated group. For Vietnam veterans publicly
to come forward, especially still during the war, required a support
system originated by those opposing the American involvement. 5 For
abuse victims to go on national television with their stories would not be
 Instant Memory 165

possible without a generally receptive and concerned climate of opinion

(at least, media opinion).
What makes the transition from "instant memory" to remembrance
different -and often difficult- in the case of traumas is that the existence
of records is more the exception than the rule. The creation of records is
then mostly a work of reconstruction, from a time distance, with all the
mnemonic problems that this implies. After forty years, "bearing wit-
ness" becomes suspect, and not only in legal terms. Historians in par-
ticular tum back to records compiled at the time, however inadequate
these may be. In that sense, the framing of remembrance reverts to its
retrieval mode.
If, in this discussion of "instant memory," I have devoted so much
attention to individual experience, it is because the actors' participation
is very much at the core of this phenomenon. It is time, though, to tum
to its ever-widening peripheries, where memory is not only instantly
produced but immediately collective in nature: the intervention by the
media. Here, the very clear line separating memorable moments we
actively create and those never-to-be-forgotten moments we are com-
pelled to live through becomes a blurred one, emotionally and analyti-
cally. The mediated experience is not our own, the vicarious participation
can neither be as pleasant or as tragic as the real one. 6 Attending to the
present so it be remembered, when all of attending to the present by
definition involves creating a record, does not have the same special
qualities any more, either. And yet, as tempting as it might be to treat all
of the media production, but especially the news and current affairs part,
as the "first draft" of collective memory, this is not analytically produc-
tive. Yes, the media provide us with a vast reservoir of raw material for
later construction of the "realities of the past," in this capacity acting as
a giant sifter and selector. 7 But the framing of "instant memory" takes a
stronger form as well, and that is one of social definition of worthiness
vis-a-vis remembrance. "Instant memory" belongs to the terrain of
newsworthy events, but it is that fairly limited realm we are asked to
preserve, individually as well as collectively. Whether we actually do is
another matter altogether, as the shifting social and political context can
deprive the once memorable moments of much of their original force. At
the time, though, that "instant memory" is being produced, we are told,
often explicitly, that this moment (and increasingly, this image) is to
endure.
166 Frames of Remembrance

One of the most media celebrated occasions in recent history was the
first man's landing on the moon. Very directly, those watching the
television sets, were told they are witness to history in the making. Images
of that landing, together with the famous "one small step for man and
one giant step for mankind" appeared destined to endure not just in
American memory, but universally. Twenty years later, as the media
commemorated the event, it became dear that even for those actually
witness to it, let alone the next generation, landing on the moon was no
longer such a pivotal event. The hope and exhilaration of the original was
gone, if only because people's lives proved ultimately unaffected by it.
In 1989, a very similar media boom surrounded the breaching of the
Berlin Wall. While here, we may be perhaps more confident that the
historical value of this event would endure, how it will be remembered
twenty years later is only for the future to tell.
Both of these events, it might be argued, were memorable in their own
right, with the media coverage only enhancing their visual qualities. It
would also be rather absurd to claim that the assassination of President
Kennedy, for example, would have been quickly forgotten were it not for
the pictures. But if several events indeed fit the model of the media
seizing on the widely perceived "historical moments," of media-as-
mediators of memory, quite a number do not. First, there are times when
the very definition of historical significance-and thus the scope and
direction of coverage-is media produced. Constitutional debates in
Canada, culminating in the fall of 1992, were for a few years framed by
the media as a key development in the life of the country, to be remem-
bered as such. Meanwhile, opinion polls, even at the crisis point, showed
a remarkable degree of public ignorance and indifference. Journalists'
assessment of the memorable significance was definitely at odds here
with the interest of ordinary Canadians.
At the other end of the spectrum, the very presence of television
coverage in particular can make a tremendous difference. For most North
Americans, the student protest in China ending with the Tiananmen
Square massacre, became an "instant memory" mainly because the
Western reporters were allowed to send many powerful images out. At
issue here is not only the ability to command media-and public-atten-
tion, but more importantly, the scaling of the events to human size. A
picture gives the all-too-complex reality a face. It offers the crucial
emotional bridge between the distant events and our private world.
 Instant Memory 167

What is perhaps most remarkable in this case of "instant memory"

production is how extensive the realm of collective remembrance was
made to be. In a true "global village" fashion, North Americans were
asked to bring the tragedy in China within their own sphere of relevance.
Unlike developments in Eastern Europe, heralded as the end of the Cold
War and thus of direct (while explicated) significance to people in the
West, events in China carried, in their final stages, a much more mixed
message. With little hope for change, Tiananmen Square thus acquired
an universal meaning of resistance to oppression, of a struggle for
democracy, becoming an identifiable if an already abstract icon.
The presence of cameras during the protest in China had also direct
(if short-lived) political implications. Providing a record of the events
meant, in this case, providing documentary evidence of repressive
violence, evidence used to counter the official Chinese voices of denial.
Knowing that the world would know made the students' actions bolder,
words stronger. Here, "instant memory" came to serve as a protective
shield, however ultimately ineffective.
Recognizing the power of visual record as record, its power to belie
propaganda statements by the authorities, has not been unique to China.
First photography, and then increasingly the video technology, have been
used by dissident forces in countries such as Poland to produce documen-
tary evidence of state oppression. Taken illegally, the pictures may be of
very uneven quality, but this too adds to their value-that of "truth." Their
distribution, both within the country and to news outlets in the West,
initially served mainly defensive purposes. In time, though, the record
becomes the base for remembrance proper. During the first few months
of legal Solidarity, for example, photographs taken of the workers'
protest in 1970 became part of a widely attended exhibit commemorating
the struggle. When Poland's foremost film director, Andrzej Wajda, made
a movie, Man ofIron, about the birth of Solidarity shortly after the events
occurred, he prominently included images modelled on those produced
by amateur photographers at the time. The artist creating "instant
memory" after the fact worked to preserve the original in full recognition
of its strength.
In 1988, Polish workers in Gdansk again went on strike, demanding
that Solidarity become legalized. This time, an independent filmmaker,
Piotr Bikont, joined them in what proved a political breakthrough. The
long documentary he produced combines the highly professional
168 Frames of Remembrance

qualities of artistic presentation with the raw nature of material, including

an unplanned scuffle of the director with state security forces. "Instant
memory" at its most powerful, it is both a record and a form of monument
to the courage of the workers. 8
What we can observe here is one of the basic principles of producing
"instant memory" -its ultimate claim to truth as a record. 9 Whether
artistically treated in fictional or documentary modes, the constructed
"reality of the past" supports itself with the as-it-happened imagery. All
the while framing the experience itself, memory workers assume an
unobtrusive presence. From the viewer's perspective, the record is a
record, even when it actually does a great deal more than securing
remembrance.
Among seasoned media critics, the idea that "instant memory" would
be a true record of the events is analytically preposterous. Yet for the
audience at large, it is precisely such documentary value of material
gathered on the spot that claims attention-and, potentially,
remembrance. The bearing of witness that used to be restricted to direct
participants has now been technologically transformed into being a
witness. A video camera is not simply a more sophisticated recording
device, it is a means allowing nonparticipants to feel as if they were there.
And although we know that such vicarious participation cannot match
the "real thing" in emotional intensity, it is still qualitatively very dif-
ferent from the experience of reading about or listening to or looking at
a photograph of. ... Not complete, of course, since both touch and smell
are missing, the being-there-via-the-camera claims the largest perceptual
territory nevertheless. And in doing so, it can most convincingly stake
claims to true representation.
Added to this potential of audiovisual technology to produce a "true
record" of events should be now the explicit (and implicit) claims by its
practitioners that such indeed is their role. 10 The various structural
devices of television coverage-from the backdrop of actual locale used
for reporters' narration to editorial preference for "going live"-work
well to create the appearance of being there, together with that of
camera's neutrality. The complexity of production and the multistage
assignment of meaning to the recorded events are hidden from view of
all but the analytically inclined. The sophistication of means is to translate
into simplicity and plausibility of results.
 Instant Memory 169

Such strong claims to faithfulness to reality should give the

audiovisual "instant memory" a highly privileged position vis-a-vis other
forms of recording events. Judging how important control over the
technology has become-by the priority granted to taking over television
stations during the political upheaval in Eastern and Central Europe, for
example-this may indeed be the case. At issue, though, is not only the
quality of record, but prominently its public distribution. The "reality of
the past" constructed (in the present) through being there with a camera
is immediately accessible to a great many people. As a resource, as a base
for remembrance, the broadcast "instant memory" would appear to have
no equals.
Yet once we shift our observation point away from societies where a
struggle for public truth is taken most seriously, an altogether different
picture begins to emerge. In North America, where saturation with
television is most pronounced, this very omnipresence of a mediated
"being there" may be working against rather than for collective
memory. 11 When the importance of securing a record gives way to largely
commercial considerations of attracting an audience, the terrain for
"instant memory" at first appears to expand vastly. Yet as we observed
earlier, the appearance is deceptive in that much of what is newsworthy
is not defined as worthy of remembrance. Indeed, for an event reported
on to be framed as memorable takes a good deal of special work. The
interruption of regular coverage, staying with the "story" for a long time,
reproduction of images in newspapers and magazines, editorial com-
ment-these are common techniques for defining events as especially
significant, and thus, at least potentially, memorable. The selection of
those events, though, follows the rules of the commercial medium and
not necessarily those of communal remembrance.
Television is a highly competitive business. Of the many implications
of this, one is of particular interest here-and that is the perpetual quest
for novelty and drama the system produces. Television news, current
affairs programs, docudramas, and features unabashedly chase after "big
stories" of the day, allowing room for delving into the past, of course,
but rapidly shifting priorities nevertheless. It is this shifting of priorities,
the framing of events as important today and unimportant, if not inexis-
tent, tomorrow that is a cause for some concern. Writing these lines
during the second week of the war in the Persian Gulf, I am reminded
daily of television's capacity and willingness to forget. The public was
170 Frames of Remembrance

reminded as well, when a Lithuanian government official appealed

directly to the media to keep his people's "story" on the air. The fact that
during the first day of the war, not a single moment of then continuous
news coverage (on ABC) was devoted to Soviet actions in the Baltic
Republics is only one of the more poignant examples of this in-and-out-
of-the-headlines practice. AIDS activists who stormed the CBS
newsroom, demanding some attention to their cause a few days later were
all too aware of the consequences of disappearance from the public
agenda. Voices of alarm from those concerned with the deteriorating
conditions in Africa, heard for more than a year of media preoccupation
with Europe, intensified as well. In Canada, the government that intro-
duced a highly unpopular tax just two weeks prior to the outbreak of the
war had no complaints, of course.
The principles of such first selection are not easy to define analytically.
One cannot assume, for example, that an underlying ideology would be
responsible for the narratives' inclusions and exclusions-in a way we
often can within academic or polemical print discourse. For commercial
television, "good stories" may be those judged most relevant to the
public, or those with the best visuals, or those valuable for their unique
point of view, or simply those well told. On any given day, unless an
event becomes subject to special, extensive coverage, the sheer time
limits of news broadcast result in further choices that may have little if
anything to do with the qualities of the stories themselves. Back in June
of 1989, for example, while events at Tiananmen Square unfolded,
capturing the attention of American networks, the day of the first
democratic elections in the Soviet Bloc (in Poland) coincided with the
day that Ayatollah Khomeini died in Iran. What, on another, "slow" day,
could have been a big story-it was, from an historical point of view-
became two lines devoted to election results.
There is another problem, too. As we have seen, international coverage
is a prominent part of television-produced "instant memory." When such
coverage is accorded to politically important developments, even in
remote parts of the world, it might be argued that the audience would
perhaps grant them some relevance. When the coverage turns to natural
and manmade disaster, such as Ethiopian famine, we know that some
people are moved to help while others may store the imagery under the
general heading of "human condition." It would be very difficult to claim,
though, that events rendered "memorable" on a global scale have priority
 Instant Memory 171

of entry into localized collective memory. Indeed, the very bridging of

geographic and cultural distances that so much defines the medium of
television can work against its capability to affect remembrance. The
power of the imagery of Solidarity lies with its rootedness in actual
experience of large numbers of people in Poland. The same imagery,
when transposed onto North American television screens is no longer so
rooted-or so powerful. If it is stored, it is literally stored among
television tapes to be used when subsequent developments warrant it. In
that way, it remains a resource for remembrance, but only within the
limited realm of television news. Not having a genuine connection with
communal life and concerns, the important events from afar can claim
our attention, they can only rarely claim the emotional investment in
remembrance.
Here we come to perhaps a central consideration for analyzing "instant
memory" -the role of sentiment. As we have seen, individuals attend to
moments that are special, whether through joy or sorrow, special in their
emotional intensity.
On a social scale, the tending to the present so it be remembered may
become more intellectualized, in a sense that the frame of "historically
significant" rests at least in part on ideas, often inscribed ideas about the
world. Yet producing "instant memory" is not a cognitive exercise, the
urge to record and to remember remains imbued with strong feelings.
(We recognize that when we ask historians not to work with current
material, or at least to distance themselves from it.) Strongest among the
participants and witnesses to the events, this emotional investment can
be conveyed to others with the use of a camera, it can be enhanced with
the skilful editing and music but it cannot be created ex nihilo. For the
viewing audience to respond to the imagery as "instant memory," there
has to exist a connection with their private emotional world, their own
sphere of relevance. 12 When such link takes the form of "sharing in
humanity," remembrance becomes tenuous, unless some additional
framing work is done to make this particular instance of universal
experience special.
Television producers inadvertently acknowledge this persistent need
for an emotional connection when, in covering distant events, they zero
in on imagery which can give them a "human face." (They also openly
attest to the principle when discussing the requirements for a successful
historical docudrama.) Often, it means reaching to eyewitnesses for their
172 Frames of Remembrance

still charged stories, allowing the camera to register the rawest of

feelings, or at least feelings that would be least transformed by the
journalistic presence. Considerable efforts notwithstanding, though, "in-
stant memory" of global dimensions remains on the margins of com-
munal remembrance.
What emerges so far is a mixed assessment of the medium's effective-
ness in the production of "instant memory." On the one hand, as a medium
of witness, television has no equals (so far), both in terms of the record
produced and its public availability. On the other hand, when it offers
"instant memory" of events well beyond the audience's realm of con-
cern-as it increasingly does, not only in North America-it is not
providing people with important resources for constructing their
"realities of the past." Without the larger and historically concrete frame
to fit them into, without a direct emotional connection, the imagery
assigned global significance is of passing interest. Passing interest cannot
sustain remembrance.
A great deal of television programming is of passing interest. This too
means that however special the "memorable moments" are made to be,
they exist within an environment not conducive to attentive depths. And,
the frequently used strategy to forge emotional ties with the people on
the screen is something that television may do best, but also something
it does routinely (witness the attachment to soap opera characters, for
example). On both counts, attending to the present so it be remembered
suffers from meaning devaluation, as it were.
Another key factor to consider while reflecting on the role of
television-produced "instant memories" is their claim to societal repre-
sentation. As many critics have pointed out, the perspective adopted in
much of television programming does not reflect the diversity found in
society itself. Commercial considerations alone do not allow for con-
troversial, conflicting, minority viewpoints. 13 A set of unspoken assump-
tions about what "United States" or "Canada" or "France" signifies can
indeed be seen as guiding the selection of events deemed memorable, the
choice of witnesses, the structuring of narratives. While control over the
medium may be becoming both less nationally centralized and more
globally interconnected, it is definitely not passing into "the hands of the
people." What this implies is that even within the realm of events directly
relevant to the audience, considerable numbers of people would find the
television framing of "instant memory" seriously wanting vis-a-vis their
 Instant Memory 173

own experience, and would be unlikely to identify with the meaning

assigned to it, or would find that what is memorable to them was
altogether excluded from the record.
As we have said, the kind of present reality that individuals attend to
for purposes of remembrance is usually of special emotional intensity. It
is a present that matters a great deal. If people may be routinely willing
to accept viewpoints very different from their own for the sake of
entertainment or even information, they are much less willing to discard
their own feelings when memory is at stake. An especially clear illustra-
tion of this differential of tolerance may be found in the response to
television among viewers in then still Communist Poland.
During the early 1980s, when television was very much compromised
by its support in the rule of martial law, when most prominent actors and
journalists boycotted the medium (and those who did not received scorn
from the public), when, in short, the stark realities of power were most
visible, people did not stop watching. Indeed, judging by the emptied
streets, they watched television more than before. With a lot of foreign
films and repeats from better times, programming proved a good enough
diversion. At the same time, though, the concerted effort to frame the
imposition of the martial law as a nation-saving event failed formidably.
And while the counter-memory work would only involve a minority of
opposition activists, using underground presses and secret seminars, the
refusal to accept the official line was very widespread. People cared that
their children not remember Solidarity as a destructive force; cared
enough to continuously tell stories rather than just tum off their television
sets.
The ability to frame public "instant memory" with electronic media is
a prized political possession. Yet we must also recognize that when their
experience greatly matters to people, when they themselves wish to
preserve it, they can and they will produce a record, be it only in the form
of stories. Immediately felt and directly relevant, such records resist the
definitions imposed from outside extremely well. Stakes are often high,
for collective identity and dignity are likely to be involved. Dis-
enfranchised groups, who do not find their views within the media
offerings, do not dissolve as a result. Collectively constructed "instant
memory" gains a great deal of persuasive power from technologically
produced imagery, but it is not dependent on it. What it is dependent on,
174 Frames of Remembrance

and what television alone cannot supply, is the emotional investment in

the present.

Notes

1. For further discussion, see Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological

Study (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987).
2. See, especially, Shimon Huberband, Kiddush Hashem: Jewish Religious and Cul-
tural Life in Poland During the Holocaust, translated from Yiddish by David E.
Fishman (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1987) and David G. Roskies,
Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture
(Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984).
3. For an extensive analysis of the "credibility problem," see Deborah E. Lipstadt,
Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945
(New York: The Free Press, 1986) .
.4 While this meant that individual survivors would feel more "comfortable" (not an
apt term here), it also worked against perceiving the Holocaust as unique.
5. See Robert Jay Lifton, Home from the War (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
6. For a comparative perspective, see Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events:
The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1992).
7. Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud, eds., From Hanoi to Hollywood. The Vietnam
War in American Film (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press,
1990) makes a strong but context-specific case for carefully attending to the initial
television coverage in particular.
8. Interview with Piotr Bikont, after the screening at Bard College, May 17, 1990.
9. The fate of the video recording of the beating of Rodney King illustrates this
dynamic in particularly poignant ways, from the initial reactions to its screening on
television to the reliance on it in court proceedings.
It will be interesting to observe the impact of the recently developed "digital
photography" on this faith in recorded images; the technology allows for an
unprecedented degree of creative freedom, while preserving the appearances.
10. For a detailed analysis, see Barbie Zelizer, Covering the Body: The Kennedy
Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1992).
11. For a provocative reflection, see Brian Fawcett, Cambodia: A Book for People Who
Find Television too Slow (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1986).
12. Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhall, lwo lima: Monuments, Memories, and the
American Hero (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991) offers rich
material on this point.
13. For further discussion and wider scope, see George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collec-
tive Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1990).
 11

Intermediaries

A teacher tells his class that the poem they are about to read is a
definitive statement on how soldiers felt in the trenches during World
War I; a museum guide first directs the visitors to the display of official
records; a television producer decides that the program on Native
Canadian land claims should run as part of the educational series on
Canadian history; a publisher times the release of two books on Iraq to
coincide with the impending military invasion. Strictly speaking, no
memory work has been performed here, no original resources for
remembering the past have been produced. And yet, there is no doubt
that the choices made at such intermediary levels matter, both in terms
of what enters into collective memory and how. Indeed, it might be
argued that the task of constructing "realities of the past" is ultimately
that of editorial framing of raw materials, of giving sense and structure
to physical traces, records, tellings.
Such memory work at arm's length greatly enriches the possibilities
in terms of assigning meaning to the past. It also presents us with some
unique analytical challenges. Precisely because so much can be done by
the intermediaries, focusing on "texts" alone may be a self-defeating
strategy, especially when studying the works' claims to truth and authen-
ticity. The meaning internal to the work, too, can become so transformed
by the time the "text" reaches the public that an altogether different one
emerges. The temptation then is to focus on the final product, but if we
do, our understanding of the dynamics of collective memory becomes
rather impoverished. Introducing more complexity into an already
demanding analytical process is not something to be done lightly. Heuris-
tic returns must be quite high to justify the extra effort. In this chapter, I

175
176 Frames ofRemembnmce

will be suggesting areas where this is indeed the case, or where memory
intermediaries deserve to take the center stage.
It might be best to begin with the recognition that securing public
presence for the past is almost always a collective endeavor, involving
various types of intermediary work. There is a certain division of labor
in place, with some people taking on the highly creative tasks of produc-
ing a "text" -be it a book, a film or a museum exhibit-while others are
concerned with marketing and distribution. And since so much of the
work relies on original materials-artifacts, records, old photographs,
writings from the times- we have an additional layer here of the creation
of these raw pieces. At the other end of the symbolic chain, as it were,
there are critics, opinion makers, and educators offering their interpreta-
tion, their frame for the text at hand. And all this happens before an
individual "reads" it.
It is very much to be expected that there occur several shifts in
meaning. What is of interest to students of collective memory is the
pattern, if any, for the emergence of a "victorious frame." At the very
least, we would like to know more about the struggle itself-as there
often is one-between different ways of framing what and how is to be
remembered.
In 1990, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto put together an
exhibition entitled "Into the Heart of Africa," using many of the artifacts
and photographs brought back to Canada by the nineteenth-century
missionaries. 1 The structure of the exhibit, and especially the long
explications accompanying the display, reflected its curator's intention
for the "tale" to be that of exploitation and racism. Trained in anthropol-
ogy and informed by highly sophisticated, postmodern sensitivity, the
curator was very much taken aback when members of the local black
community accused the exhibit and the museum of racism. A flurry of
commentaries followed in the press, and while "Into the Heart of Africa"
was allowed to complete its run, all the planned travel arrangements were
cancelled. After long and protracted negotiations, the museum issued a
carefully worded apology for inadvertently hurting community feelings.
While officially settled, the controversy did not die, with views on the
issue sharply dividing people on both sides of the racial line.
What most upset the critics in this case were the photographs, with
their depiction of African "primitives." The written commentary refram-
ing the images did not go unnoticed, but was said to be a highly
 Intermediaries 177

ineffective way to change perceptions of an average museum visitor, and

especially those of school children routinely ignoring long, complex
explanations. When defenders of the exhibit added in their sophisticated
comments, the argument took an anti-elitist tum. If the reframing effort
could only be successful for a few, bred on postmodemism, that only
added insult to injury. At issue was clearly more than curating
methodologies.
For students of memory, controversies such as this offer a special
opportunity, as they bring to the foreground the work behind the final
product, with all the radical shifts in meaning along the way. What was
attempted with "Into the Heart of Africa" is not an isolated incident,
either. Present sensibilities on issues such as racism or sexism lead to
many an effort to reread texts from the past, to use literature in particular
as "evidence" of historical wrongs. These efforts too meet with resis-
tance, though ordinarily not from the victim groups. The outrage over
the exhibit may be an indication that images are more resilient to
reframing, or at least that a complex commentary is a weak companion
to visual persuasion. Photographs speak to us about the reality they
capture; it takes an altogether different, usually analytically inspired,
sensitivity to ask them to speak about the photographers. And even if we
are listening for those authorial clues, the image itself retains its powerful
voice all along.
Some years ago, I was browsing through big coffee-table books while
visiting with friends in California. I came across a splendidly edited
album of photographs of African tribesmen in their ritual body attires.
About halfway through, I flipped to the front page-these pictures were
taken by Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's court filmmaker. What ensued was a
long and at times heated discussion with my friends, who knew two of
Riefenstahl 's films-and who saw nothing wrong in admiring her current
work. As troubled as I was by the moral implications involved, I too had
to admit that the images were powerful-and beautiful-in their own
right. Even recognizing that the choice of the subject could well be a
logical extension of the Nazi fascination with race had little effect in the
end.
Such symbolic independence of images can work the other way, too.
In 1986, a writer/photographer team published (in the U.S.) Remnants:
The Last Jews of Poland, a well-meaning testimony to the disappearing
culture. 2 On their own, the stories were highly sympathetic to the people
178 Frames of Remembrance

they were about, if all too sensitive to the difficulties inherent in non-Jews
undertaking the task. The pictures, though, some one hundred of them,
told a different tale altogether. They made for a display of exotic
specimens, curious creatures as if already dead. The only warmth left
was that of a nostalgic glow usually reserved for objects.
It is possible I reacted too harshly to these particular images; after all,
I could have been easily included. But the fact remains that they, rather
than the text, carried more weight here; the attitude to Poland's Jews,
they both reflected and encouraged, also proved to fit very well indeed
into the then new patterns of remembrance. What troubled me, in this
case, was that this attitude be invisible, that it would seem natural to those
looking at the pictures, all my critical efforts notwithstanding.
Yet if the perspective on the world, embodied in a photograph, appears
to resist reframing efforts, the same cannot be said about our ways of
seeing the photograph itself. The very presence of photographs within a
museum exhibit defines them as elements of historical record; the con-
fusion in Toronto was about what exactly the pictures were the record of,
not about their documentary value as such. When photographs are
exhibited in an art gallery, we are asked to see them as works of art
instead. As many debates testify, when such status is given to erotic
images, the frame is all too open to demolition. Photographs in books
may acquire a number of different definitions-as art, as document, as
illustration, as glimpses into the private sphere, as shorthand for complex
realities. Publishing pictures "from the family album" gives them new
importance while retaining the old definition.
For students of collective memory, clearly not all of such framing
practices are equally relevant. What would interest us the most is the
work involved in transforming private into public remembrance, the
assigning of documentary value to individual images while placing them
in a larger context of recounting the past. The putting together of a book
(or exhibit) on municipal history, the use of original stills in films, or in
mixed-media educational tools-these are all instances of memory in-
termediaries acquiring a priority role in the framing sequence. As we
learned, such editorial effort need not effectively change the meaning of
the photographs; it does, though, bring the imagery to particular,
memory -directed attention.
More generally, it is the work of those who define existing "texts" as
important to our sense of history and then proceed to use them in a
 Intermediaries 179

coherent story that calls for further reflection here. To understand how
collective memory is constructed, we naturally tend to focus on writing
or image-making deliberately invoking the past. Yet while justified, such
strategy poses risks of ignoring a rather large territory where the past
itself serves as a reservoir, to be freely rummaged through for memory
markers. 3 In the process, "texts" that were never intended to be a
historical record become just that. Unlike photographs, which are
memory markers at conception, as it were, these are all framed as such
after the fact. And since their original meaning is often no longer readily
available to us, it is up to the memory editors to restore it, alter it or
perhaps make it up altogether.
At its most immediate, rummaging through the past can produce a
form of "textual" history-whether of armaments, early movies or
calendars. The objects or pictures speak of their own development over
time; they function indirectly as a record of culture. Familiar to museum
visitors, such a specialized display of (mostly) technical achievements
tends to frame the past generally as stages of progress. Even when
nonlinear in design, that is when only one specific period is the focus,
such looking back relies on our vantage point in the present-a vantage
point that rarely allows for any sense of inferiority.
Material objects, including dwellings, can be framed in an altogether
different fashion as well. No longer confined to one or two categories,
their selection aims at reconstructing, as best as possible, a certain way
of life. Rather than speak of their own development, artifacts, and
buildings are asked to tell a tale of their once owners and inhabitants.
Frequently, the display is not complete until human figures are present,
whether literally or through make-believe. Here, the explicit aim is
unashamedly voyeuristic-we are taken on a journey back in time,
looking in on the "real people. "4
Whether it is a pioneer village or an aristocratic palace, the effort to
recreate a way of life almost inevitably makes it seem cleaner, more
orderly, prettier than it actually had been. It is as if the design invites a
certain amount of sanitization; the very presence of visitors may be
working against authenticity.
A poignant case in point-and a rather rare example of an attempt to
recreate a horrific reality-is the museum at the camp in Auschwitz.
Housed in the original prisoners' barracks and utilizing many of the
objects found on site, the display is aimed at evoking the "as if I was
180 Frames of Remembrance

here" feelings. Yet the very solidity of the buildings, the clean interiors,
the cut lawns outside, all produce very mixed emotions. To many visitors,
it is ultimately the other visitors which render empathy impossible. And
indeed, while most exhibits on the Holocaust employ some authentic
materials (such as camp uniforms, for example), they rely on much more
complex, multimedia approaches to the subject. The infamous simulation
of riding in a boxcar, found in Los Angeles, is indeed an exception. 5
At many architectural sites, the two frames combine, usually in the
form of the guide's narrative. At the Coliseum in Rome, for example, we
learn about the history of the structure itself, as well as about the Romans.
Without such narrative, the building's value as a memory marker would
be very low indeed. This does not mean our knowledge has to be acquired
on site, of course, but it does mean that as "records of' buildings need
an accompanying tale. If walking down the boulevards in Paris gives one
a vague sense of immersion in history, it is not until the contextual
information is available that we begin to partake in local memory.
Contrary to photographs, then, architectural structures are very sym-
bolically dependent on the editorial memory work-as would be most
artifacts. That does make them open to radical reframing practices, as
when a Polish Catholic cathedral in the now Lithuanian capital Vilnius
is described, on the frontal plaque, as a Lithuanian cultural monument. 6
Only a well-informed visitor to towns and villages across Eastern Europe
would be able to recognize the traces of Jewish presence in buildings
now functioning as storage facilities or community centers-beyond the
hardly visible ornamental detail, nothing is there to suggest it.
When going to a foreign country, conscientious tourists equip them-
selves with many a guidebook in clear, if implicit, recognition that
reading of the past calls for more than direct encounter with architectural
splendors. In a sense, writers of such guides are memory interpreters par
excellence, as they synthesize and translate one culture's memory into
universal terms. A careful study of their efforts would be of more than
passing interest to students of framing remembrance; what it is likely to
reveal are different "ownership claims," for one, as buildings are placed
within the varying boundaries of cultural heritage. In places where such
boundaries overlap-such as Jerusalem-the potential for such claims
to clash is great. But even in less turbulent locales, we can learn a
considerable amount about the community from how it presents itself to
visitors, on site as well as in advance.
 Intermediaries 181

The staking of ownership claims is not confined to architectural

structures, of course. Indeed, when looking at the construction of collec-
tive memory using as its raw materials "texts" produced in the past, one
of the central analytic questions is that of to whom is that memory said
to belong. Or, since the material itself may carry several identification
tags, as it were, it is up to the memory workers to select one that best
suits their purposes.
As with many other aspects of memory work, the staking of specific
ownership claims often goes unnoticed-unless such claims are being
contested. For many years, for example, it seemed perfectly natural for
books and films about the Holocaust to be classified under "Jewish
history"; libraries, school curricula, public spaces, all reflected that
separation-through-specialization scheme. And then came the efforts of
theologians, cultural critics, and social scientists reflecting on the
Holocaust to make its memory central to our sense of the history of
Western civilization and Christianity, efforts that if only partly successful
in terms of educational practices have already proved a continuous
challenge to the earlier views. What also emerged, and ultimately proved
most problematic, were numerous specific claims from non-Jewish
groups to be remembered as victims of the Holocaust, claims potentially
undermining the very idea of Shoah. For American curators in particular,
encouraged to construct Holocaust memorials in many urban centers,
these clashing visions of their respective "owners" posed serious practi-
cal as well as philosophical difficulties. Not only were they confronted
with morally, intellectually-and aesthetically-challenging decisions,
they also had to respond to pressure from lobbyists, the contemporary
"representatives" of the different pasts. 7
By the time such debates over ownership occur, the original
"proprietors" are by definition absent from the scene. Only rarely is it
possible to trace the intended path of remembrance, an identification with
a particular community of memory. Contemporary advocates know this,
insofar as they so frequently base their claims on appeals to honoring the
original intentions. It is then most interesting to get a glimpse of the
process when the authors and their texts are in fact both present, when
questions about the intended memory space are not hypothetical.
In a recently published collection of stories by Canada's "ethnic"
writers, 8 the editors made a rather unique allowance for the authors' own
voices, with short interviews accompanying the texts themselves. Almost
182 Frames of Remembrance

without exception, the idea of multicultural representation, orienting the

very structure of the book, is being contested by the so neatly categorized
writers. In effect, by aligning themselves with writing first, Canadian
writing second, they refuse the marginalization as they see it in ethnic
labelling. Should this collection be put together a hundred years from
now, the editorial voice would of course prevail. Free to disagree with
the frame, these writers make us sharply aware both of its existence and
of its politics.
Staking memory ownership claims is often a political act. At its most
basic, it bespeaks of the current definition of the community, of the
membership rules as they emerge and shift. Both at a local level and
nationwide, who is remembered as one of "us" rather than various "them"
matters. Of special interest to us here is the important role played in this
process by the intermediaries of collective memory. If words and images
at times do speak for themselves, more often than not it is the subtle and
not so subtle work at the level of classification that assigns them to
collective owners. Once again, the strategies used become more visible
for inspection when they are subject to debate-or at the very least some
questioning. In my study of Poland's rather sudden appropriation of
Jewish memory as its own, for example, I was able to trace many a shift
in ownership patterns since these were central to the whole endeavor;
editorial comments accompanying translated verses from the Talmud
explicitly framed those as a part of Poland's heritage, while writings in
the more contemporary Jewish philosophy would be placed under the
heading "interesting culture" rather than history. Quite literally, in-
dividuals and texts were now said to belong equally to Jewish and Polish
memory.
Observing such a transformation in its early stages privileged the
voices of intellectuals, public-opinion makers, and editors. Once their
work is done, though, once there is a fair degree of acceptance for the
new rules on ownership of the past, the crucial mediating task falls to
educators and popularizers of ideas. (The curriculum debates in North
America would be a case in point here, as much as testifying to the fact
that such stages can coincide in social practice.) With time, the redefining
of "us" and "them" of remembrance is likely to result in original memory
work, of course, and indeed without such fresh perspectives offered by
historians or artists, the redefinitions would not be complete. Just as
importantly, though, those "texts" which had been initially borrowed and
 Intermediaries 183

reframed would retain their superior status; coming from the past, they
authenticate the whole.
On November 9, 1989, crowds breached the Berlin Wall. News media
the world over loudly proclaimed the day as historical. It was. But as Elie
Wiesel commented with deep sadness, the date itself-November 9th-
had already entered history. In 1938, the Nazi-instigated "night of the
broken glass" marked the beginning of violent persecution of the Jews.
In 1989, everyone seemed more than ready to forget it. Historical
coincidence aside, the shift of focus that occurred was justifiably seen as
symbolic of a larger shift in framing of remembrance. In the practice of
memory, dates as occasions for commemoration do carry a great deal of
meaning. Indeed, one of the better ways of gauging the importance of
collective memory as well as of tracing its narrative structure is to look
at the texture of its yearly communal cycle. 9 Dates work as a convenient
shorthand for usually complex historical entities. Beyond marking cer-
tain time off for active remembrance (and here, the round anniversaries
appear as the top choice), dates may also enter into the language itself as
symbolic carriers of the past. In this capacity, the "date" need not be as
precise as when marking a special moment; months, years, even decades
or centuries may qualify as well. Local specificity imports here, not only
in terms of the actual events so marked, but the very type of markers
being used. In North America, references to 1930s or 1950s or 1980s,
with all their multiple meanings, are fairly common. In Poland, its history
of struggle with the Communist regime is neatly encapsulated in month
names instead: October (1956), March (1968), December (1970), August
(1980). In both contexts, though, there are days (rather than dates) that
become powerful bridging devices between collective and individual
memories; Americans, the ones old enough, of course, all recall their own
whereabouts when they first heard of President Kennedy's assassination;
Poles speak of the day, when remembering themselves finding out
martial law had been imposed (in 1981). The lifespan of such vivid
memories is of necessity limited, and they rarely cross local boundaries.
(In the age of global communications, this may indeed change; one thinks
of man's first steps on the moon as a case in point.) These days can, and
often do, become permanently marked as dates for commemoration, thus
both gaining and losing in presence. The gain is in the separate space
accorded within the communal calendar; the loss is in precisely that
separation from the flow of daily living.
184 Frames of Remembrance

The highly symbolic and frequently emotional charge of dates as

memory markers makes them likely focal points in ideological disputes.
For the United States to establish Martin Luther King's birthday as a
nationally celebrated holiday was seen as a significant step towards racial
equality. In Central and Eastern Europe, one of the first acts of newly
elected post-Communist parliaments was often the return to old com-
memoration days and the cancellation of those imposed by the previous
regime. 10 The debates surrounding May 1st-in theory as well as prac-
tice-signalled the difficult accommodation with the once-exploited
memory tool.
These debates, together with the dispute over the "proper" celebration
of King's birthday (and many similar arguments) point to an important
quality of dates-their inherent "sponginess." Precisely because dates
work as a memory shorthand at its most reductive capacity, their meaning
can be filled in, enlarged, filled out, changed, in short constructed with
much greater ease than when narratives are involved. As occasions for
commemoration, dates do not define its form; here, once again, the
texture of remembrance can shift, at times in quite unexpected directions.
Amidst the many discussions about the legacy of 1492, for example, it
became clear just how diverse the "proper meaning" of 1992 could be.
What was also rather remarkable, though by no means unique, was the
range of people involved in the defining and redefining process, from
Native American activists to academics to government officials. Testify-
ing to a widely shared perception of the high symbolic importance of
such special memory markers, the work of intermediaries thus took on
its most public tum.
To what extent the days set aside for remembrance actually function
that way inevitably varies, too. Columbus Day may be simply a holiday
to enjoy, while King's birthday now belongs within a larger educational
effort at celebrating black history. On the 75th anniversary of the Russian
Revolution (in 1992), its as-yet-unsettled legacy resulted in a confusing
array of symbolic gestures, attempts to remember as well as forget. If
dates cannot easily be erased altogether, transforming them as "occasions
for ... " is another matter.
If dates emerge here as especially "spongy" of memory markers-and
photographs as the rather sturdy ones-the differences are of degree,
rather than kind. In principle, I would argue, all traces of the past are open
to continuous framing and reframing. What we need to understand better
 Intermediaries 185

is just how open; the answers might be found by looking at what memory
workers actually do with the material at hand. 11
Among the intermediaries, one group deserves more attention than it
usually receives-the translators. Their work makes it possible to claim
the once foreign past as one's own-where the two are separated by
language divides, as was the case with much of Polish-Jewish heritage.
It may also make for a wider scope of collective memory when a
community severs its linguistic links with its own past-as would be the
case with further generations of immigrants to North America for whom
bridges with the "old country" must be built in English. 12 More generally
still, translators provide for the possibility of a crosscultural if not an
international base to our sense of history, for the possibility of empathy
with an altogether different view of events.
The key word here is "possible." There are no guarantees whatsoever
that when an English Canadian reads, in English, a French Canadian
account of Anglo-dominance, his views about Canada and his people's
role would dramatically change. But, without any access to how the other
side sees the matter, especially when historical grievances are concerned,
there is little chance indeed for a new understanding to emerge. The fact
that so few efforts are made in this direction in Canada today does not
bode well for the country's future; separate, if not clashing memories are
poor grounds for compromises.
If the work of translators is rarely acknowledged by students of
remembrance, it is, I think, related to an implicit recognition that they do
not set the priorities themselves, that translation is akin to manual labor
on the construction of collective memory with blueprints and overall
design decided elsewhere. Analytically, we are more interested in the
engineers. Indeed, it is the presence of translation-rather than its
quality-that may offer first clues as to how open to outside perspectives
is a given collective memory. 13 To follow up on such clues means, though,
turning one's attention to wider issues of cultural politics, be it within the
marketplace or strictures of state-imposed rules. And in this way, it means
joining together with a long established analytical tradition-the study
of "gatekeepers."
Looking at the top levels of decision making while inquiring about the
dynamics of collective memory is something I approach with consider-
able caution. It is all too easy to explain many social practices away by
recourse to "commercialism" or "censorship." Even in places where the
186 Frames of Remembrance

state clearly had control over how the past would be publicly presented,
such as the Soviet Union, a student of collective memory would be well
advised to investigate below the top, to ask questions about historians,
writers, educators as well as the public at large. It is becoming increas-
ingly clear that as censorship receded, beginning in the late 1980s, no
magic discovery of historical truths ensued; the picture is a great deal
more complex, pointing, so far, to the importance of interpretive grids
over and above any of those imposed by the state, grids of collective
self-definition. 14 In other words, coercion alone cannot account for the
vicissitudes of the past. Where the controls had never been as tight to
begin with, as would be the case in Poland, censorship carries even less
explanatory power. 15 It can become a convenient rationalization for
inaction, as when the void surrounding the Jew in Poland's memory is
explained by state-imposed silence; the reasoning is convincing only if
we ignore that in no other area was the state successful in establishing a
monopoly on remembrance. It can be used as a badge of honor of sorts,
as when some rather mediocre works gain acclaim solely because they
were once forbidden to appear. In short, censorship itself can assume
mythological qualities within the newly constructed vision of the recent
past-and should be studied as such.
All this is not to deny that censors' decisions count, they do. But
leaving matters at that level can be most misleading, for it leaves out the
numerous stratagems people employ to write and read between the lines,
their use of metaphor and humor-and the presence of eye witnesses.
Our understanding of the dynamics of memory in an Orwellian universe
is still much too tentative for the inquiry to close by censorship fiat. 16
The powers of the state, where the state is powerful, are not limited to
keeping the unorthodox views out of the public sphere. Indeed, it might
be argued that it is in its role as a sponsor that the state exercises most of
its control over memory work. In totalitarian regimes, the state aims to
be the only sponsor, through a complex structure of cultural and scientific
institutions, prominently including the media. Democratic countries
differ, of course, in the scope of such state sponsorship, diffusing it
among various levels of government and supplementing it with a large
network of private interests. In the Western world, countries also differ
sharply in terms of the overall arrangements for cultural production -and
the specifics of sponsorship for memory work. Those very differences,
between, let us say, nationwide, tax supported Canadian television and
 Intermediaries 187

the American networks, make generalizations about big-business-as-

gatekeeper analytically suspect. What is more, in the area of memory
construction, we are likely to encounter all the different types and forms
of sponsorship. In its very nature, remembrance matters at the local,
regional and national levels; the work of artists is often commissioned
and even the most commercial of endeavors could draw on support for
higher causes. The mixture of science, journalism, education, design, and
popular culture-all participants in the construction of collective
memory-does not allow for generalized rules about top decision
making. What it calls for is the analyst's attentiveness to the specifics, as
we do want to know who is responsible for this other than that framing
of remembrance.
At times, the question is of purely academic interest, in the sense that
we like our inquires to be elegantly complete. But at other times, the issue
of sponsorship (and control) becomes an essential one if we are to
understand the public response and responsiveness to memory offerings.
The fact that the Vietnam War Memorial was not sponsored by the U.S.
government matters well beyond the veterans' community who did fund
it. When a special interest group is behind proposals to commemorate its
heroes, its main task often consists of hiding such patronage. The
controversy over the African exhibit in Toronto would have looked very
different if the exhibit did not have the official blessings. The respect
enjoyed by the Catholic Church in then Communist Poland-and the
wide disrespect for the regime-made me give a great deal more weight
to voices originating in the former. The works of institutional history,
written by people employed by the very institutions they describe, can
be dismissed as hagiographic despite their intrinsic scholarly value. The
television series Holocaust was dismissed by many a critic precisely
because it was the product of a commercial network.
Sponsorship, in short, can both lend an additional authority to the work
at hand and detract from it; what it actually does clearly depends on the
context, cultural, social, and political. Sponsorship may also retain a
fairly neutral status, again, depending on the context. Our task as students
of memory then is to bring the significance of sponsors-if any-to the
foreground, in order to better account for the readings the work is likely
to receive. In doing that, we are in effect illuminating yet another
"frame" -and another link between public and private remembrance.
188 Frames of Remembrance

A careful case by case analysis of the conditions of sponsorship-and

censorship-can be most useful in yet another way. If what we are aiming
to explain are the blank spaces in the public record of the past, questions
about top level decision making allow us to move beyond informed
cultural or political hunches. For example, when the book Vichy and the
Jews 17 appeared in 1981, many a reviewer made a great deal of the fact
that this first extensive and popular history of a morally troubling chapter
in French history was written by Robert Paxton and Michael Marrus-an
American and a Canadian. The French historians, together with the
public, it was plausibly suggested, just did not want to delve into such a
problematic era. Considering the earlier reluctance which greeted Marcel
Ophuls's documentaries about that period, the explanation seemed con-
vincing indeed. But it was not correct. French historians I questioned on
the subject would point to a number of earlier works, not publicized in
North America, to be sure, but important within France. And Robert
Paxton 18 would point to the consistently high level of cooperation granted
to him, then a junior and a foreigner, throughout the project. What he saw
as the possible reason for the relatively low priority assigned to research
in the area was a mundane but powerful principle of scientific work-the
best scholars attracting the best students and most renown, in this case
for analyses of pre-revolutionary France. Vichy and the Jews could not
magically reset those priorities; what it did do was to move the debates
into the very public stage of the media, defying any generalized ideas
about self-imposed silence.
What this example also illustrates, albeit in an unusual fashion, is the
important role of yet another group of memory intermediaries-the
critics. In this case, the book was placed in the "important, new, con-
troversial" frame, all the while the rather large terrain of French memory
work on the Vichy period would be confined to the "insignificant"
category. The strategy itself is not at all infrequent, as the label
"breakthrough" works wonders for marketing purposes. Discussion of
the ways of looking at the past naturally lends itself to emphasis on the
new, the original. But critics do more than assess the significance of the
"texts" at hand; they also, routinely, interpret them for us. And just as
sponsorship alone can add weight and meaning to the work, critical
insight, when respected, provides it with another influential frame. Even
when not respected, the voice of critics counts for much in terms of
exposure; with a tremendous number of historical books published each
 Intermediaries 189

year, this is of special importance for the scholarly output, where only a
select few enter the truly public realm. Media attention devoted to the
exhibit in Toronto clearly extended the scope of controversy well beyond
those directly involved. Movie reviews, in anticipation of-or follow-
ing-the Oscar awards not only increase the size of potential audience
for such important memory works as Born on the Fourth of July or
Dances with Wolves, they also ask the viewer to think in particular ways.
Television critics may be simply asking us to pay attention, not a small
feat in the "zapping" zone.
Critics also, at least the good ones, provide a context for the work at
hand. In this capacity, they have definite advantage over even the
well-informed reader. While we can-and we often do-argue with the
proposed interpretation and assessment of the "text," we are usually
malequipped to disagree with the attached background. For works deal-
ing with the past, the contextual information can vary a great deal, yet is
inherently beyond most people's cognitive reach.
We may be offered a brief historical base line against which the work
is critically scrutinized; or, other "texts" dealing with the same subject
are brought forth for a comparison, or, ever more generally, the state of
collective memory as such is being assessed-on all counts, the framing
that is taking place is hard to reject. The most we can do is to ignore it.
The contribution from critics does at times go beyond the directing of
attention and the framing of readings. At its most in depth, the critics'
analysis becomes critical analysis of memory construction tout court. 19
Akin to the self-reflective work of writers and artists themselves, which
exposes the processes of remembrance, the path taken by some critics
leads us into the very center of questions about truth, narrative, memory
and history. What distinguishes their voices from those coming from the
academia proper is that they are heard by a much wider group. Thus while
important in their own right for students of memory, the insights so
expressed count for more than the useful ideas that they are. Shaping and
reshaping popular thinking on the subject, especially once the
intellectuals' attitudes transfer to the educational system and the mass
media, ideas about memory construction become part of that very con-
struction. Much work remains to be done for us to acquire a better sense
of how such channelling of cultural sensibility operates in different
societies, how the broadly accepted definitions of truth, authenticity, and
190 Frames of Remembrance

plausibility in historical accounts help or hinder the framing strategies

used by memory practitioners. 20
An illustration from my own efforts to capture this dynamic may
clarify the analytical predicament here. When the subject of Polish-
Jewish relations during the Holocaust began to be seriously discussed in
Poland (in the mid-1980s), it was first as a response to Claude
Lanzmann 's film Shoah, shown in parts on state run televisionY Virtual-
ly all of the critical reviews of Shoah reflected on it being an unfairly
selective attempt at remembrance; Lanzmann said nothing about the
Poles' aid to the Jews. Historical truth thus became defined as a balance
sheet of facts and figures. Perhaps more importantly, the idea of moral
responsibility for the fate of Poland's Jews was directly linked to those
facts and figures. As a result, the Catholic Church, for example, the prime
target of Lanzmann 's criticism, was exonerated from any blame by citing
its record of hiding Jews during the war. (This understanding of history
was not new, but it became crystallized and widely publicized.)
For Lanzmann, and indeed for most people reflecting on the Holocaust
in the West, the notion of moral responsibility carried an altogether
different meaning, both more diffuse and indirect. The Church was to be
held responsible for its teachings, over the centuries, that allowed for
widespread indifference, if not hostility towards the Jews. Much of Shoah
spoke to this issue, with great conviction, one should add. The message
was very loud and clear, and yet remained so completely outside the
intellectual and emotional parameters of Poland's memory that it was not
to be heard.
The role of the critics, in this case, was to explicate the already widely
shared views; their voices strengthened a particular sensibility without
disrupting its structure or content. It would be most interesting to examine
situations where the opposite happens, where the critics set out to
transform accepted ideas about remembrance, or work to question estab-
lished framing strategies. What are the effects, if any, of popularizing a
postmodem stance towards representation of the past?
To gauge such effects, though, it might be necessary to move beyond
the relatively narrow confines of intellectual discourse in mainly print
media. It is time to visit the schools. Indeed, our brief survey of memory
intermediaries would be sorely incomplete without mention of educators,
people directly responsible for shaping both the attitudes towards history
and the contents of publicly accepted "realities of the past." Whether such
 Intermediaries 191

responsibility translates into efficacy is an empirical question, of course;

some studies indicate that schools have lost a great deal of ground to
popular culture here. 22 We need to know more about that, just as we need
to know more about the practices inside and outside the history class-
room. Studies of textbooks, while illuminating, cannot provide us with
a full picture, as any teacher might testify. Enthusiasm-or boredom--
generated in school could make the difference between passive and active
remembrance. The use of audiovisual aids, inviting witnesses to events
to speak to the class, initiating projects in local or oral history-these are
all important for how the young see the past. The degree and form of
participation in communal commemorative rituals counts as well.
Educational practices can rarely be separated from the wider social
and political context, though. Having gone through school in a system
aiming to instill the one "correct" version of history-and having wit-
nessed how such hegemonic strategy failed-! am perhaps extra sensi-
tive to the possibility of cracks in the edifice of political controls. But
this is not to deny the need to look at the interrelations between education
and politics in general, or those between teachings about the past and
their legitimating potential. Debates about the curriculum in North
America are just one case in point here; the current turmoil in the schools
in the once Soviet Union is another terrain well worth exploring. As
students of memory construction, though, we would be well advised to
treat the assumptions about the role of schools that inform such political
debates as just that-assumptions. The battles fought in the educational
area tell us a great deal about politics of the moment, but very little about
the actual importance of victories or defeats. They naturally assign
priority to what happens in schools, and even more specifically, to the
contents of the courses. This emphasis may or may not be justified; much
further research is called for here.
Speaking now in general terms again, I think the work of memory
intermediaries deserves more attention than it has so far been granted. If
"texts" generate multiple readings, and they do, focusing on how some
of those readings are privileged over others is of considerable help.

Notes

L See also chapter 4.

2. Malgorzata Niezabitowska, Remnants: The Lastlews ofPoland (New York: Friend-
ly Press, 1986). (Excerpts in National Geographic, Sept. 1986.)
192 Frames of Remembrance

3. Especially rich in examples here is David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
4. Problematizing this relationship is Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting
Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, D.C.: Smith-
sonian Institution Press, 1991).
5. See Judith Miller, One, by One, by One: Facing the Holocaust (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1990).
6. Catherine Goussef, "URSS: Wilno, Vilne, Vilnius, capitale de Lituanie," in Alain
Brossat, Sonia Combe, Jean-Yves Potel, Jean-Charles Szurek, eds., A l'Est, la
mimoire retrouvie (Paris: Editions la Decouverte, 1990), 494-96.
7. See also chapter 2.
8. Linda Hutcheon and Marion Richmond, eds., Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicul-
tural Fictions (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990).
9. I am indebted to Zev Gerber for his insights on this point, especially in relation to
practices in Israel. See also William M. Johnston, Celebrations: The Cult of
Anniversaries in Europe and the United States Today (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Transaction Books, 1990).
10. See Alain Brossat, Sonia Combe, Jean-Yves Potel, Jean-Charles Szurek, eds., A
l'Est, Ia mimoire retrouvie (Paris: Editions Ia Decouverte, 1990).
II. Robert Paine, "Masada: A history of a memory," (Memorial University) un-
published paper, is an illuminating case study of this process.
12. Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin, eds. and trans., From a Ruined Garden: The
Memorial Books ofPolish Jewry (New York: Schocken Books, 1983) is an example
here.
13. It is, for example, highly telling that Ronald Wright, Stolen Continents: The New
World Through Indian Eyes Since 1492 (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1992) became a
national bestseller in Canada, and will be, in turn, translated into German, French
and Italian. (Ronald Wright, personal communication, October 20, 1992.)
14. For further discussion, see Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, "In Search of Usable Pasts,"
Society 30, 2(January/February 1993):32-36.
15. For a rare record of the practice, see Jane Leftwich Curry, eel., The Black Book of
Polish Censorship, translated by Jane Leftwich Curry (New York: Vintage Books,
1984).
16. Most illuminating here are studies compiled in Alain Brossat, Sonia Combe,
Jean-Yves Potel, Jean-Charles Szurek, eds., A l'Est, Ia mirnoire retrouw!e (Paris:
Editions Ia Decouverte, 1990).
17. Michael R. Marrus and Robert 0. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York:
Basic Books, 1981).
18. Interview, April20, 1983, in Paris.
19. See, for example, Ian Buruma, "From Hirohito to Heima!," The New York Review
(October 26, 1989):31-32 and 40-45.
20. Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German Na-
tional Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988) illustrates the
high analytical returns here.
21. For further discussion, see Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, "Shoah in Poland," in Jean M.
Guiot and Joseph G. Green, eds., From Orchestras to Apartheid, (North York,
Ontario: Captus University Publications, 1990):99-108.
22. See, for example, Henri Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in
France since 1944. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1991).
 Select Annotated Bibliography

The following list of sources has been compiled as an aid for students of the
dynamics of collective memory. By no means exhaustive, it aims to reflect
the range of material pertinent to the inquiry. My brief comments about the
texts, in the form of mini-reviews, serve to guide the reader through the
multiplicity of approaches encountered in this rapidly growing area of study.
The emphasis here is on the more recent publications in English; a separate
section signals some of the French works available. With a few exceptions,
articles in edited volumes are not treated individually.
After some experimenting with various categorizing schemes, I have opted for
a strictly alphabetical order of the listings below. If the result appears to defy
any rules of intellectual order, it also reflects the riches (and the challenges)
of multidisciplinary endeavor.
Andetson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso, 1983.
Very useful for students of collective memory, this book offers both conceptual
tools and interesting empirical materials (including some from Asia). The
argument stresses powers of sentiment and counters some of the extreme
claims about "inventing traditions." Critical theory at its best.
Avisar, Ilan. Screening the Holocaust: Cinemas Images of the Unimaginable.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988.
Valuable for its comparative scope (North American, Western and Eastern
Europe; documentary and fiction), as well as the insistence that film can deal
with the extraordinary events in a meaningful way. Critical emphasis here is
on the challenges of representation, historical truthfulness, and comprehen-
sion. Filmography.
Between Memory and History, edited by Marie-Noelle Bourguet, Lucette Valen-
si and Nathan Wachtel. History and Anthropology, vol. 2, part 2. October
1986.
A rare opportunity to sample French scholarship; ten of the eleven essays are
case histories of reactions to the domination/suppression of collective
memory. Wide range of subjects (contemporary Zaire, Jews, working class),
unifying concerns with group identity. Includes a good analytical overview
by Wachtel.
Boyarin, Jonathan. Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

193
194 Frames of Remembrance

Intellectually stimulating essays, connecting the Jewish tradition and culture to

questions posed by critical theory and postmodem reflection. Included is a
rare case study of forgetting (on the Lower East Side in New York). Boyarin
speaks directly to the experience of both being Other and "Othering."
Butler, Thomas, ed. Memory: History, Culture and the Mind. Oxford and New
York: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
Based on Wolfson College Lectures, this collection of eight essays focuses on
the themes of forgetting and healing, moving from psychology and
psychoanalysis to history and anthropology. Materials include studies of
Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Interesting also for its quasi-spiritual tone of
concern, placing academic analysis within a wider "Memory Movement."
Casey, EdwardS. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987.
A useful "reference book" on the pervasive role of memory in human ex-
perience. While the focus is on individual life-worlds, much of the terrain
covered here belongs to the realm of socially shared (reminiscing, places,
objects, commemoration). Ideas to work with when analyzing the complex
texture of remembrance.
Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989.
A challenging "correction" to the prevailing emphasis on cultural texts. Con-
nerton argues that much of tradition is transmitted through bodily practices
and rituals, mnemonic devices responsible for "habit memory." Open to
question here is his insistence that these practices lack any cognitive/inter-
pretive component (which is said to be their key strength).
Davies, R. W. Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution. Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989.
Accessible to nonspecialists, the book provides rich case study material. Focus-
ing on the public debates of 1987-88, Davies looks at both the substantive
changes and the profession itself; strong on historical background and current
politics. A "snapshot" of an unique situation.
Davis, Fred. Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: The
Free Press, 1979.
An early look at what has become a major cultural force, the book offers a wealth
of empirically grounded insight. Combining questions about the meaning of
nostalgia for the individual's identity (and life cycle) with those about the
institutional and societal dynamic, Davis shows the complexity of this force.
Of special interest is his balanced discussion of the media.
 Select Annotated Bibliography 195

Dawidowicz, Lucy S. The Holocaust and the Historians. Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1981.
A sharply critical analysis of the production of social forgetting, covering the
U.S., England, (West) Germany, U.S.S.R., and Poland. A prominent historian
herself, Dawidowicz argues against treating the Holocaust as an "ethnic"
event. Useful also as background to the more recent shifts/debates.
Dayan, Daniel, and Elihu Katz. Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of
History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.
An empirically rich, comparative study of a crucial element of the global
memory landscape. Very balanced in its focus on how the coverage frames
the events (such as royal weddings) but also on how people creatively
respond to the occasion. It shows the importance of local cultural context
while uncovering patterns of new public rituals generated by television.
Dittmar, Linda, and Gene Michaud, eds. From Hanoi to Hollywood: The
Vietnam War in American Film. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers
University Press, 1990.
An excellent book. Nineteen essays offer a critical examination of over one
hundred fictional and documentary films, as we11 as television coverage.
Scholars and critics, many having served in Vietnam, focus on strategies of
distortion and forgetting. Activist in tone and intent, the analysis privileges
questions about coming to terms with the experience of the Vietnam era.
Includes an extensive filmography.
Doneson, Judith E. The Holocaust in American Film. Philadelphia: The Jewish
Publication Society, 1987.
An insightful analysis of how the Holocaust has become Americanized, now
serving mainly as a metaphor for human suffering. Very balanced in its
treatment of The Diary of Anne Frank and the series Holocaust. Doneson
emphasizes the actual workings of commercial film and television, in that
the study can serve as a model for others.
Eksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern
Age. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1989.
A bold cultural history, drawing together art, public rhetoric and private ex-
perience, this book is in part a study of how co1lective memory (of the war)
was constructed. Rich in detail, both in terms of practices of remembrance
and the wider transformations in European culture. Contains a challenging
conclusion on the rise of Nazism, with issues of memory at the center.
Evans, Richard J. In Hitler s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt
to &cape from the Nazi Past. New York: Pantheon Books, 1989.
196 Frames of Remembrance

Brief and balanced, the book examines key issues in the 1980s debates. Focus
here is on the writings, but some social and political background is provided
as well. Resource material for analysts of forgetting.
Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven. By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature. Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Valuable for its wide, comparative scope, as well as its overriding concern with
the imperatives of historical reality. Included are mainly works of fiction (and
poetry), from Eastern Europe, Israel, and America. Interesting reflections on
language.
Fawcett, Brian. Cambodia: A Bookfor People Who Find Television too Slow.
Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1986.
Provocative and often disturbing reflections, from a non-academic writer.
Mixing fiction and reportage, Fawcett raises basic questions about remem-
bering genocide in Cambodia. Another major concern is with the obliteration
of cultural identity in the "global village."
Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub, M.D. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in
Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York and London: Routledge,
1992.
A disturbing book. Besides interesting essays on teaching, Camus, and
Lanzmann 's Shoah, Felman offers an impassioned defense of Paul de Man's
silence about his collaborating with the Nazis, a defense equating that silence
to reactions on the part of Holocaust survivors. Also, only a minimal
recognition is given to vast scholarship on the topic to which Felman claims
to bring new insights.
Fentress, James, and Chris Wickham. Social Memory. Oxford and Cambridge,
Mass.: Blackwell, 1992.
A major analytical statement, with focus on the uses of the past in the formation
of collective identities. Insisting on moving beyond the fact/fiction
dichotomy, the authors stress the role of narrative genres as structuring and
constraining the transmission of memory. An unique empirical base, com-
bining medieval history, studies of Sub-Saharan Africa, working class
England and Sicilian mafia. Many a challenge here to oral historians.
Field, Norma. In the Realm ofa Dying Emperor: A Portrait ofJapan at Century s
Ef!d. New York: Pantheon Books, 1991.
An important case history of memory, forgetting, and resistance. By chronicling
three individual struggles against the official silence, Field shows just how
strong Japan's reluctance is to confront its recent past. The author's own story
(of mixed background and migrations) adds a lot of cultural sensitivity here.
 Select Annotated Bibliography 197

Friedlander, Saul, ed. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the
"Final Solution." Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.
An important book, the first to bring theoretical concerns of discourse analysis
(contributions by White, LaCapra, and others) directly against the moral
concerns with relativising the Holocaust. Proceedings of a conference, the
book retains its debating style. 1\venty essays, with focus on both historical
narratives and artistic renditions (prose, poetry, film). Valuable intellectual
bridging between Holocaust studies and the postmodem "mainstream."
Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York and London:
Oxford University Press, 1975.
An imaginative and moving account of how literature and experience inter-
penetrate in the construction of World War I myths and images. Beyond its
strengths as cultural history, the book provides illuminating examples of the
interplay between individual and collective memory work. Of special interest
to students of generational influence on values and ideas.
Garber, Zev, with Alan L. Berger and Richard Libowitz, eds. Methodology in
the Academic Teaching of the Holocaust. Lanham and London: University
Press of America, 1988.
The first collection to address wideranging pedagogical questions, it offers
invaluable material for students of transmission of memory. Seventeen
essays deal with matters of instructional content as well as audience; there
is a section on the use of literature and the arts; surveys of textbook and
classroom practices are also included. Interdisciplinary and interdenomina-
tional. Extensive references.
History & Memory: Studies in Representation of the Past. Bloomington, In-
diana: Indiana University Press, 1991-.
A new journal, edited by Saul Friedlander. It brings together scholars from
Europe, North America, and Israel. So far, its key emphasis has been the
problematics of Holocaust memory. Included, though, are theqJftically
oriented studies as well as varied empirical material. Valuable resource,
especially for its international scope.
Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
A problematic classic. By documenting how governments and elites "manufac-
ture" rituals and symbols for purposes of legitimacy, essays in this volume
provide a wealth of empirical detail, yet also an analytically onesided view
of memory construction. To use with caution when studying nationalism.
lrwin-Zarecka, lwona. Neutralizing Memory: The Jew in Contemporary
Poland. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1989.
198 Frames of Remembrance

A case study in very selective remembering. While the book focuses on the
"explosion" of interest in things Jewish of the early 1980s, its explanatory
framework relies heavily on historical material. Of interest to students of
dealing with morally troubling past, as well as those concerned with genera-
tional dynamics and oppositional memory. Also here is an extensive critique
of nostalgia.
Kaes, Anton. From Hitler to Heimat: The Return ofHistory as Film. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.
An excellent analysis, with focus on self-conscious memory work, i.e., films
that take both the past and remembrance as challenges. Key (West) German
movies since 1970 show a pronounced shift towards questions about identity,
prefiguring the historical debates of the mid-1980s. Firmly situated in their
sociocultural context, the filmmakers' ideas speak to the ambiguities of
Germany's engagement with the past in general.
Kamrnen, Michael. Mystic Chords ofMemory: The Transformation of Tradition
in American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.
A treasure trove for students of Americana, historical preservation, collecting
and museums; extensive detail as well as references. Strong on the earlier
periods, Kamrnen 's treatment of the last six decades omits both movies and
(most of) television; virtually nothing is said about the recent debates about
"multiculturalism." The book illuminates especially well the changing ideas
and practices of guardianship of memory, at the local, regional and national
levels.
Karp, Ivan, and Steven D. Lavine, eds. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and
Politics of Museum Display. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1991.
For the nonspecialist, this is a good introduction to current debates about
museum practices, with emphasis on minority representation. Twenty-seven
essays by professionals and scholars offer an empirically rich and varied base
for questioning the relationships between the "raw materials," framing
strategies and visitors' interpretation. Included is a discussion of folklore,
festivals, and ethnographic exhibits, of particular interest to students of
collective memory.
Karp, Ivan, Christine Mullen Kraemer, and Steven D. Lavine, eds. Museums
and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. Washington, D.C.: Smith-
sonian Institution Press, 1992.
A sequel to Exhibiting Culture, this volume contains mainly empirical case
studies, of direct interest to students of collective memory/identity. Discussed
are not only new roles for museums, but the context of tourism, historical
preservation, and popular culture as well. Seventeen essays cover a wide
 Select Annotated Bibliography 199

range of etlmicities, with a special emphasis on African Americans. Al-

together, a good grounding for understanding the "multiculturalism" debates.
Kruger, Barbara, a.11d Phil Mariani, eds. Remaking History. Dia Art Foundation
Discussion in Contemporary Culture no. 4. Seattle: Bay Press, 1989.
TI1is collection of twelve essays by prominent advocates of "new historism"
allows for a close look at the deconstructionist strategies. Some speak
directly to questions about collective memory (e.g., Hoberman on Vietnam
movies), others address broader concerns with representation (e.g.,
Treischler on AIDS discourse). Strong presence of critique of sexism, racism,
and postcolonialism.
Kuchler, Susanne, and Walter Mellion, eds. Images of Memory: On Remember-
ing and Representation. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1991.
Conceived as an inquiry into culturally and historically informed relations
between memory, cognition and image production, this collection of eight
essays is virtually inaccessible to people not trained in art history. Individual-
ly, too, the studies cover rather arcane subjects, making for difficult bridging
wiili contemporary concerns.
Kugelmass, Jack, and Jonathan Boyarin, eds. and trans. From a Ruined Garden:
The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry. New York: Schocken Books, 1983.
The unique quality of memory work presented here makes iliis book a valuable
resource for general relection. An analytically strong introduction, plus the
thematic structure of the selections together emphasize the patterns of
"narrative cemeteries" constructed by survivors of communities destroyed
in the Holocaust.
Langer, Lawrence L. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1991.
A compelling, if emotionally draining book. The first analysis of interviews with
survivors (most collected at Yale), it challenges us to rethink all the comfort-
ing notions about "learning from history." In stark contrast to mediated
accounts, memory-as-lived defies any narrative closures. This is also a
meditation on our ability to listen, comprehend, and remember.
Lincoln, Bruce. Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative
Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification. New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989.
Though broader in scope, the book has much to offer to students of
remembrance. The heuristic strategy here stresses the role of sentiment;
"discourse" prominently features action. Materials under analysis include
varied uses of the past. An especially interesting section on Spain during the
Civil War and the "rituals of collective obscenity."
200 Frames of Remembrance

Lipsitz, George. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular

Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
A close reading of select films, television programs, music and novels shows
how popular culture can serve as a repository for diverse, often oppositional
narratives. Interesting materials, strong anticonservative agenda; the very
diffuse conceptualization of collective memory, however, lessens the book's
analytical transportability.
Lowenthal, David. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985.
Invaluable for its analytical and empirical breadth, this is the most extensive,
historically grounded examination of approaches to the past. The book shows
just how varied and complex the attitudes to the past have been; focus is on
social practices and ideals. The materials here are mainly British and
American. Of particular interest to students of nostalgia and the commercial
usages of history.
MacDonald, George F., and Stephen Alsford. A Museum for The Global Village:
Canadian Museum of Civilization. Hull: Canadian Museum of Civilization,
1989.
An extensive insiders' report on the philosophy and practice of memory work.
Valuable as material for reflecting on the current and future predicaments of
museums, but also for its detailed descriptions of complex interactions
between ideas, process and product. The lack of self-critical distance is
compensated by the scope of presentation.
Maier, Charles S. The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German
National identity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.
A penetrating analysis of the historians' debate, placing it in a wider context of
questions about the role of collective memory and postmodern turns. In-
cludes a highly informative discussion of the conflicts over the concept of
the museum of German history, again, in a comparative perspective.
Marling, Karal Ann, and John Wetenhall./wo lima: Monuments, Memories, and
the American Hero. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.
A fascinating, detailed account of the fate of one of the key American icons.
Since the much reproduced image of the flag on Iwo Jima turns out to be
historically inaccurate, this is a case study of memory construction at its most
basic. Raises many questions about "proper" remembrance. It also brings the
human dimension into the analytical foreground.
Marruss, Michael M. The Holocaust in History. Toronto: Lester & Orpen
Dennys, 1987.
 Select Annotated Bibliography 201

Arguing that it is both possible and necessary to integrate the Holocaust into the
"general stream of historical consciousness," Marrus critically assesses vast
scholarship in the area. This unique effort not to delve into reflection on
remembrance raises many fundamental questions about the role of historians.
Textbook format.
Memory and Counter-Memory, edited by Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph
Starn. Special issue of Representations, no. 26, Spring 1989.
A good introduction; seven essays mix empirical studies and theoretical reflec-
tion, including a translation of the key text by Pierre Nora. Editorial reflec-
tions place the growing interest in the subject in the context of current world
events. A strong critique of "imperialist nostalgia" by Rena to Rosaldo.
Middleton, David, and Derek Edwards, eds. Collective Remembering. London:
Sage, 1990.
A useful introduction to the emergent bridging of psychology, social psychol-
ogy, sociology, and discourse analysis. Eleven essays, with emphasis on case
studies of collective action/processes; crosscultural materials. Interesting for
its general tone of "discovery," exemplifying just how still powerful is the
idea of memory-as-a-mental-state. Valuable references.
Miller, Judith. One, by One, by One: Facing the Holocaust. New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1990.
An important book, for its comparative range as well as focus on collective
memory (rather than historiography). Covers Germany, Austria, Holland,
France, the Soviet Union; with a sharply critical chapter on the United States.
Written by a New York Times reporter, it is rich in evocative detail, even if
the brevity of chapters sacrifices some analytical depth. The first work of its
kind.
Monumental Histories. A special issue of Representations, no. 35, Summer
1991.
An interesting collection of seven case studies of collective memory. Especially
strong is the essay on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial by Marita Sturken and
Wu Hung's history ofTiananmen Square. No analytical introduction, though.
Mosse, George L. Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars.
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
An important study of both the creation and the implications of the "Myth of
the War Experience," with focus on Germany plus other nations defeated in
1918. Mosse looks at the public iconography, monuments, ceremonies, as
well as literary narratives. Sanctification of sacrifice while domesticating
death is shown in an its political force.
202 Frames of Remembrance

O'Connor, John E., and Martin A. Jackson. American History/American Film:

Interpreting the Hollywood Image. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing
Co., 1979.
A pioneering collection of studies using films as resources for historians. Among
the varied approaches present, eight essays are devoted to movies' repre-
sentation of the past (especially wars and conflicts), thus offering rich case
study material. Avoidance of purely textual analysis is a major strength here.
Palmer, Bryan D. Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the
Writing of Social History. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.
A good, critical entry into current debates, particularly for nonspecialists. Lucid
explication of deconstructionist strategies as they apply to historical inter-
pretation, and a strong argument for a return to materialism. Helpful to
students of intellectual trends.
Rabinbach, Anson, and Jack Zipes, eels. Germans & Jews since the Holocaust:
The Changing Situation in West Germany. New York: Holmes & Meier
Publishers, 1986.
Bringing together four essays on the reaction to the series Holocaust with
reflections on German/Jewish identity and antisemitism provides for a valu-
able context to the discussion. A case study in the dynamics of social
forgetting.
Rousso, Henri. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944.
Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1991.
An ambitious and largely successful history of memory (to late 1980s). Rousso
is attentive to the complexities of social practices; while focusing on public
debates, he also analyzes movies, scholarship, teaching, and opinion surveys.
Television, though, is only minimally treated. Some familiarity with the
French scene very much enhances the reading here.
Samuel, Raphael, and Paul Thompson, eds. The Myths We Live By. London and
New York: Routledge, 1990.
A collection of seventeen case studies (culturally very wide range of materials),
unique for its oral history approach. Foregrounds the complex relations
between private and public myths, the variety of uses to which the past is put
as well as common narrative strategies. Of special interest to students of
smaller social units. Strong introduction.
Schudson, MichaeL Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember,
Forget and Reconstruct the Past. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
An exemplary analysis, weaving together the rich empirical detail and theoreti-
cally powerful insights. Schudson argues for a balanced, free-yet -constrained
 Select Annotated Bibliography 203

view of memory construction. Of particular interest (since otherwise rare)

are sections on careers, legislative reforms and language as carriers of
memory. Multiple meanings of the past are brilliantly brought forth.
Skloot, Robert. The Darkness We Carry: The Drama ofthe Holocaust. Madison:
The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.
An engaging analysis of over twenty theater plays in different languages
(including German), foregrounding the challenges unique to the medium.
The material here offers a valuable base for reflection on the dramatic formats
and strategies of remembrance.
Thelen, David, ed. Memory and American History. Bloomington and In-
dianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Originating in the special 1988 issue of the Journal of American History, this
volume offers a good introduction to new empirical research. Thelen's strong
analytical essay helps to appreciate the value of case studies which follow.
Self-reflective in tone, the book also addresses questions about the role of
historians in the construction of collective memory.
Young, James E. "The Biography of a Memorial Icon: Nathan Rapoport's
Warsaw Ghetto Monument," in Representations, no. 26, Spring 1989, 69-
107.
Exemplary work, part of a larger (forthcoming) study of Holocaust monuments
and memorials. Young is one of the pioneers of the "history of memory."
Here, he offers a rich, context-sensitive analysis, of special interest to
students of shifts in meaning as impacted by time/locale.
Zelizer, Barbie. Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and
the Shaping of Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992.
A solid analysis of how journalists, rather than historians, became the voices of
authority. Very detailed on the rhetorical strategies used over time, with a
brief discussion of Stone's JFK as welL Missing here is any sense of the
experiential base for the journalists' and the public's memories, thus of the
powers of resonance. Useful references.

French Languages Sources

Baczko, Bronislaw. Les Imaginaires sociaux: Memoirs et espoirs collectifs.

Paris: Payot, 1984.
An interesting collection of essays, linking reflection on memory and utopia.
One of the central themes is the treatment of both by totalitarian regimes
(especially Stalinism). Includes a case study of the "explosion of memory"
in Poland in 1980.
204 Frames of Remembrance

Brossast, Alain, Sonia Combe, Jean-Yves Potel, Jean-Charles Szurek, eels. A

L'Est, la rnemoire retrouvee. Paris: Editions Ia Decouverte, 1990.
A valuable collection of twenty-five case studies devoted to the vicissitudes of
collective memory in the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, Hungary and
Czechoslovakia. Includes sections on the construction of forgetting,
manipulating the past, and conflicts. Much of the material is from the early
stages of transformation to post-Communist societies. Wide range of
phenomena covered, from the fate of monuments to commemorations to
museums and archives.
Finkielkraut, Alain. L'avenir d'une negation: Reflection sur la question du
genocide. Paris: Seuil, 1982.
An early, provocative analysis of Holocaust "revisionism," placing it squarely
within the intellectual traditions on the Left. Sharpest critique is reserved for
Noam Chomsky (who endorsed Faurisson's denial of the existence of gas
chambers). Emphasis here is on subtle mechanisms of manipulation of
language to fit ideologically derived schemes of historical interpretation.
Lapierre, Nicole. Le silence de la memoire: A Ia recherche des Juifs de Plock.
Paris: Pion, 1989.
An insightful case study of the uprooting of remembrance. Lapierre, through
interviews with Jews from this small town in Poland now living around the
world, reconstructs the vicissitudes of memory/identity. Also, a powerful
account of the dynamics of forgetting in the town itself.
La memoire et l'oubli. Special issue of Communications. Paris: Seuil, 1989 (no.
49).
An important collection, with focus on the mechanisms of social forgetting.
Sixteen essays (with two by Americans) exemplifying the value of interdis-
ciplinary exchange. Brief, mostly theoretical; subjects range from Freudian
model to computers to amnesties. Includes a rare look at name changes (by
Lapierre).
Namer, Gerard. Batailles pour Ia memoire: La commemoration en France
1944-1982. Paris: Papyrus, 1983.
A case study of conflict with high political stakes, exemplary for its attention to
public ceremonies, parades and the media coverage. The key actors here are
followers of General de Gaulle and French communists, battling for accep-
tance of their visions of post-Revolutionary past. It is also an analysis of the
production of forgetting (the 1940-45 as defeat).
Nora, Pierre, ed. Les lieux de memoire, 3 volumes. Paris: Gallimard, 1982-86.
The most extensive examination to date, organized into the following themes:
physical heritage, historiography and landscape (vol. 1); territory and bor-
 Select Annotated Bibliography 205

ders, the state, museums and monuments (vol. 2); the glory and the word'>
(vol. 3). The latter offers analyses of memories of World War I, iconography
of heroic death, street names, key Paris institutions. Although all of the
studies use French materials (and the collection itself is conceived as a tribute
to France), there is a wealth of general insights here, a model for empirical
work attending both to the sites and the construction of collective memory.
Forty-nine contributions. (Four more volumes appeared in 1992-93.)
Le temps et la mimoire aujourd'hui. Special issue of L'Homme et la Societe.
Paris: L'Harmattan, 1988 (no. 4).
Mainly theoretical reflections, linking the study of collective memory to the
constructs of time. Included are essays on the role of family histories,
generations, as well as methods of field research. A broad introduction to
current work in France.
Wieviorka, Annette, and Itzhok Niborski. Les livres du souvenir: Mimoriaux
juifs de Pologne. Paris: Editions Gallimard/Julliard, 1983.
An insightful analysis of memory work, drawing primarily on the books
commemorating the destroyed Jewish communities, but also on broader
dynamics of Jewish tradition with its central preoccupation with
remembrance. Of particular interest to students of nostalgia.
 Index

All Quiet on the Western Front, 90 Cala, Alina, 131 n.22

Alsford, Stephen, 111 n.3 Canada: English vs. French memories,
Americans: and J. F. Kennedy's assas- 185; ethnic writers, 181-82; and
sination, 166, 183; and Martin Luther Holocaust denial, 35; identity refer-
King's birthday, 184. See also Chris- ences, 91; including the Other, 142;
topher Columbus, Curriculum Jewish/Ukrainian relations, 34-35;
debates, Holocaust Memorial knowledge of Canadian history, 9;
Museum, Vietnam War media/constitutional debates, 166;
Anderson, Benedict, 65 n.23, 100 n.7 multiculturalism, 61-63, 99, 140;
Antisemitism: and discussing the Stolen Continents, 192 n.l3; Uk-
Holocaust, 35-36; in Eastern Europe, rainians, 92
97 Canadian Museum of Civilization, 102-
Archives: and technology, 104 03, 105-06, 108
Arendt, Hannah, 31, 39,43 n.26 Casey, EdwardS., 65 n.l3, 100 n.2, 174
Argentina, 136 n.l
Auschwitz: controversy, 68-69; as dis- Censorship, 185-186
ruption, 29; modifications to Central and Eastern Europe. See Eastern
museum, 32-33; museum, 179-80; Europe
and silencing the Jew, 118-19; sym- Chalk, Frank, 42 n.12, 131 n.13
bolic potency, 26-27 China: and media coverage, 166-67; and
Austria: and national honor, 80; and Nazi social forgetting, 115-16
past, 120 Class reunions, 55
Authors: and authority, 6 Collective memory: architectural sites,
Avisar, Ilan, 41 n.4 180; articulating its significance,
139-41; artist-as-witness, 152-54;
Baczko, Bronislaw, 65 n.20, 143 n.7 artists' self-reflection, 157-58; at-
Balfe, Judith, 21 n.4, 84 n.2 titudes of students in southwestern
Bauman, Zygmunt, 42 n.l4 Ontario, 9; audiovisual technology,
Bellah, Robert N. eta!, 42 n.l8 168-69; authenticity, 152-54;
Berger, Alan L., 42 n.17, 43 n.28, 64 n.3, beautification, 103, 108-09; censor-
159 n.16 ship, 186; challenges to collective
Berlin: and Holocaust memory, 40; identity, 97-98; and collective iden-
Jewish museum, 13; Nazi head- tity, 9, 91-94, 99-100; commer-
quarters, 24 cialization, 106-09; and communal
Berlin Regional Court, 12 solidarity, 57-64; community boun-
Between Memory and History, 144 n.l5 daries, 182; and consumers, 105-07;
Bikont, Piotr, 167 as countering forgetting, 125-26;
Born on the Fourth of July, 6, 48 critics, 188-90; cultural sensibility,
Boyarin, Jonathan, 64 n.lO, 131 n.l8, 125-26, 189-90; definition, 4, 54-55,
192 n.l2 150; differences in "readings", 146-
Brossat, Alain et al, 65 n.l5, 100 n.ll, 47; diversity of forms, 145-46;
192 n.10, 192 n.16 division of labor, 176; documentary
Buruma, Ian, 192 n.l9 films, 156-57; dormant traces, 14, 89-
Butler, Thomas, 144 n.l6 91; educators, 190-91; and emotional

207
208 Frames of Remembrance

investment, 171-74; empirical case vivors, 164-65; varied scope, 47; and
studies, 6; and "essence" of historical visions of progress, 107; and visual
reality, 147; evaluative criteria, 12, record, 167-69
23; and everyday life, 161-63; Columbus, Christopher: debates about
eyewitness accounts, 152-52; future legacy, 7, 75,77
audience, 101-02; "gatekeepers", Commemoration ceremonies, 5
185-87; and global scale, 170-72; Communist regimes: history of dis-
heterogeneity of research practice, sidence, 82-83; legacies, 8, 109-10,
20; and historians, 147-49; and his- 126
torical moments, 166; historical Communities of memory: and conflict,
reconstructions, 179-80; ideal of 63; in daily interactions, 54-55; as
"truth", 158; ideological positions, formed by traumas, 47-52; and
95-96, 98-99; and individual generational experience, 52-54; and
memories, 55-56, 183; and moral traumas, 50-51; and public
individuals' records, 105, 163; and resonance, 51-52; and Soviet gulag,
individual views, 4, 19; "infrastruc- 51; and the state, 61-64
ture", 90-91; interdisciplinary boun- Connerton, Paul, 21 n.ll, 100 n.9
daries, 3-4, 10; and lived experience, Copp, Terry, 160 n.23
15-18, 75, 173-74; and marketing, Cowan, Neil M., 159 n.l3
108; material objects, 179-80; and Curriculum debates, 135-36, 182
media coverage, 151-52, 165-74; Czechoslovakia: and Communist past,
minority viewpoints, 172-73; moon 74-75, 126
landing, 166; and moral imperatives,
9; and morally problematic past, 94- Dates: and commemoration, 183; in
99, 120; museum displays, 179-80; ideological disputes, 184; legacy of
mythical structure, 57-58, 92, 154- 1492, 184; local specificity, 183;
55; and normative order, 9, 41; openness to redefining, 184~85
obligation to record events, 163-64; Davies, R. W., 130 n.5, 159 n.7
obligations to remember, 25; oral his- Davis, Fred, 111 n. 7
tory, 152; "ownership claims", 180- Dawidowicz, Lucy S., 130 n.6
83; photographs, 175-77; physical Dayan, Daniel, 174 n.6
markers, 150-51; plausibility claims, Deak, Istvan, 42 n.ll
18; in post-Communist countries, DeKoven Ezrahi, Sidra, 41 n.4
109-10; and postmodemism, 103; Delbo, Charlotte, 27
principles of selection, 87 -89; Depression: as formative event, 53
problematics of memory space, 24- The Diary ofAnne Frank, 29
25; production process, 13; and Dobroszycki, Lucjan, 131 n.22
psychological categories, 164; public Documentary film, 156-57
storytelling, 151-58; and public fund- Dorfman, Ariel, 131, n.19
ing, 104-05; regional identity, 62-63; Doneson, Judith E., 42 n.9, 159 n.l7
restructuring: see memory projects; Donovan, Josephine, 143 n.3
role of "good stories", 154-55; as
sacred, 150; schools, 148-49; selec- East Germany. See Germany (East)
tion by television, 169-72; sponsor- Eastern Europe: antisemitism, 97; his-
ship, 186-87; state legitimacy, 61-64; torians, 149; and new commemora-
status of truth, 145; symbols, 151; as tions, 184; post-Communist, 96-97;
symbolic resource, 67; talk, 55; tech- recovery of memory, 140; roles as-
nology, 104-05, 162-63; television, signed to history, 109-10; traces of
155-56; "texts", 175-76; translators, Jewish presence, 180
185; traumas, 41, 153-54; trauma sur- Eckardt, Alice L., 31,43 n.24
 Index 209

Eckardt, Roy, 31,43 n.24 Goussef, Catherine, 192 n.6

Edehnan, Marek, 28 Grass, Gunther, 100 n.S
Edwards, Derek, 21 n.l Grimes, Ron, 85 n.l5
Educators, 190-91 Grynberg, Henryk, 154
Eksteins, Modris, 65 n.12, 100 n.5 Gulag: memories of, 51
Elon, Amos, 21 n. 7 Gutman, Yisrael, 159 n.14
Europe: and calls for ethnic purity, 63;
and multiethnic communities, 63 Habermas, Jurgen, 41
Evans, Richard J., 43 n.29 Halbwachs, Maurice, 21 n.l
Havel, Vaclav, 126
Family memories, 55,87-88, 175-76 Heimat, 50
Fawcett, Brian, 174 n.ll Heritage preservation, 91, 106, 108
Fein, Helen, 42 n.l3 Historians: as advisors, 148; authority,
Feminism: as memory project, 133-35. 147 -49; Eastern Europe, 149; France,
See also Women's movement 149, 188; Germany, 149; and in-
Fentress, James, 22 n.17, 131 n.21, 159 dividual experience, 149; and social
n.18 forgetting, 116-17; trust in, 15
Field, Norma, 22 n.13, 84 n.5, 85 n.l4, Historians' debate. See Germany (West)
131, n.25 Historical truth: its analytical status, 15,
Le Figaro, 6 145; claims to, 5; and oppositional
Finkielkraut, Alain, 43 n.27, 65 n.l6, 130 memory, 147
n.lO History: "official" version's weight, 19
Forgetting. See Social forgetting History books, 5, 6
Framing: analytical status, 4-5, 8 Hobsbawn, Eric, 22 n.17
France: historians, 149, 188; and Holocaust: and beliefs in progress, 36-
Holocaust memory, 95-96; and 37; as challenging our ability to
memory conflicts, 73; memory of remember, 25-26; and Christianity,
Vichy period, 188 36; and historical inquiry, 30-31;
Friedlander, Saul, 41 n.l, 42 n.5, 154, meaning of "resistance", 33-34; and
158 n.l moral accounting, 39; and naming,
Fussell, Paul, 65 n.12 26; obligation to record it, 163-64;
perceptions in Poland, 37-38;
Garber, Zev, 41 n.3, 42 n.l7, 192 n.9 Poland's moral responsibility, 38-39;
Generations: as communities of memory, Polish aid to the Jews, 39; scientific
53-54 studies of, 30; sociological studies of,
Germany: historians, 149; and 30; as theological challenge, 36; writ-
Holocaust memory, 40-41, 94-96; ings on, 27
Nazi myths, 58; private memories of Holocaust (TV Series), 8, 29, 154; in
Nazi era, 55; November 9, Germany, 50
1938/1989, 183 Holocaust denial, 35, 119-20
Germany (East): border guards on trial, Holocaust education: issues of moral
12; memory of Communism, 127; responsibility, 34; and religious
Stasi archives, 4 dimension, 36; and universities, 37
Germany (West): historians' debate, 40- Holocaust Memorial Museum
41; 69-70, 94; memory of Nazi era, (Washington, D.C.), 8, 33, 138
50 Holocaust memory: its analysis in rela-
Gilbert, Martin, 28, 42 n.S tion to research on collective memory
Globalization, 108 in general, 11-12; authenticity, 153-
Goffman, Erving, 4, 21 n.3, 100 n.3, 159 54; and Berlin, 40; and Canada, 34-
n.2 35; claims f~om non-Jewish victims,
210 Frames of Remembrance

181; comparative analysis, 16; con- Jerusalem, 180

structing the obligation to remember, Jews: grieving without graves, 24-25;
32-33; constructing the record, 32- memory coflict with Poles, 77-78; as
33; defming the heroes, 28; and em- people of memory, 57. See also
pathy, 28-29; exhibits, 179-80; and Holocaust, Holocaust survivors
France, 95-96; generational factor, Jewish memory. See Holocaust memory,
40; and Germany, 40-41, 94-96; and Poland
Gypsies, 130 n.7; and historians, 28; Jonassohn, Kurt, 42 n.12, 131 n.13
justification for 37-38; and kitsch, 27; Johnston, William M., 192 n.9
and moral accounting, 38-39; as non- Journalists, 149-50
traumatic in Poland, 49; opening
basic questions, 27-28; and "owner- Kaes, Anton, 64 n.8, 100 n.15
ship claims", 181; perceptions of, 27; Kammen, Michael, 21 n.9, 65 n.27, 111
in Poland, 18, 37-38, 48, 120, 190; n.1, 144 n.14
political implications, 34-35; Karp, Ivan, 85 n.15, 100 n.18, 111 n.2,
reflexivity, 157-59; and second 144 n.13, 192 n.4
generation, 48; and a sense of com- Katz, Elihu, 174 n.6
munity, 48-49; shifting obligations Kirk, H. David, 65 n.21
to, 8; and understanding, 29; and Kitchener, Ont., 35
United States, 33; and L'univers con- Kolbe, Maximilian, 128
centrationnaire, 48 Kolmel, Rainer, 41 n.2
Holocaust studies: interdisciplinary Koonz, Claudia, 143 n.4
cooperation, 31-32; psychological Korman, Gerd, 130 n.6
demands, 32 Kornberg, Jacques, 42 n.16
Holocaust survivors: educational role, Kosinski, Jerzy, 159 n.15
34; meaning of the term, 48; and Krall, Hanna, 42 n.7
Memorial Books, 52; and moral ac- Kruger, Barbara, 22 n.18
counting, 39; return to Eastern Kugelmass, Jack, 64 n.10, 64 n.ll, 192
Europe, 52; traumatic memories, 164 n.12
Horowitz, Donald L., 65 n.22
Horowitz, Irving Louis, 100 n.4 Lang, Gladys Engel, 160 n.19
Huberband, Shimon, 174 n.2 Lang, Kurt, 160 n.19
L'Humanite, 6 Langer, Lawrence L., 64 n.4, 160 n.25
Hutcheon, Linda, 192 n.8 Lanzmann, Claude, 124, 131 n.20, 190
Huxtable, Ada Louise, 111 n.4 Lavine, Steven D., 85 n.l5, 100n.18, 111
n.2, 144 n.13, 192 n.4
Individual "memory household", 88-89 Language: and Holocaust memory, 26-
Institutional history, 187 27
Institutional memory, 55, 87-88 Leftwich Curry, Jane, 192 n.15
"Into the Heart of Africa", 68. See also Legendre, Bernard, 131 n.26
Royal Ontario Museum Levi, Primo, 27, 31
Isabella, Queen of Spain, 128 Levy, Bernard-Henri, 131 n.17
Libowitz, Richard, 42 n.17
JFK (film), 5, 6 Lifton,RobertJay,64n.l, 130n.12, 174
Japan: commemorating Hiroshima and n.5
Nagasaki, 16; and national honor, 80; Lincoln, Bruce, 84 n.13, 159 n.9
social forgetting, 120; and survivors Lipsetz, George, 174 n.13
of atomic bomb, 48 Lipstadt, Deborah E., 174 n.3
Japanese Canadians, 59-60 Lizhi, Fang, 143 n.6
Jaworsky, John, 64 n.9
 Index 211

Lowenthal, David, 111 n.6, 21 n.S, 144 and time passage, 73-75; Turkish/Ar-
n.l9, 192 n.3 menian, 72, 78, 96
Lyons, Andrew, 84 n.l Memory projects: Canada, 140; con-
Lyons, Harriet, 84 n.l fronting cruel regimes, 136-37;
definition, 8; and empowerment,
MacDonald, George F., 111 n.3 135-36; feminist, 133-35; under glas-
Maier, Charles S., 84 n.6, 100 n.l4, 192 nost, 136-37; to include the Other,
n.20 142-43; pedagogical value, 138;
Man of Iron, 167 Poland, 137; Poland's recovery of
Mariani, Phil, 22 n.l8 Jewish heritage, 142-43; and public-
Marling, Karal Ann, 21 n.lO, 143 n.lO, at-large, 133; public participation,
159 n.3, 174 n.l2 138-39; rationale, 139-40; and
Marrus, Michael, 30, 42 n.l5, 188, 192 remembrance, 137-38; reworking the
n.l7 old materials, 141-42; and risk of
Mattelard, Armand, 131 n.l9 sanitizing the past, 134-35; and
McConkey, Mike, 131 n.16 school curricula, 135-36; stages, 141;
McLuhan, Marshall, 106, 146 sponsorship, 139-40
Media coverage: claims to truth, 168-69; Memory work: critics' reflexivity, 189-
critics/reviewers, 188-90; and histori- 90; division of labor, 176; by inter-
cal moments, 166; newsworthiness, mediaries, 175-77, 181-83;
165-66; Persian Gulf war, 169-70; redefming existing "texts", 178-80;
selection principles, 170; and social situating in context, 16; and special
forgetting, 183; Tiananmen Square, occasions, 162
166-67. See also Television Mertl, Steve, 43 n.23
Memory conflicts: and analytical Michnik, Adam, 111 n.lO
neutrality, 78-79; over ancient Native Middleton, David, 21 n.l
remains, 82; about Auschwitz, 68-69; Miller, Judith, 42 n.l9. 130 n.3, 192 n.5
about Columbus's legacy, 75, 79-80; Milosz, Czeslaw, 100 n.8
and communal boundaries, 71-72; Mirsky, Jonathan, 130 n.4
under Communist rule, 68, 82-83; in Montreal massacre, 143 n.5
Czechoslovakia, 74; defming matters Monumental Histories, 144 n.ll
at stake, 76-78; degrees of public ar- Monuments, 151
ticulation, 72-74; in France, 73; emo- Moscow, 111 n.9
tional intensity, 71-72; and ideals of Mosse, George L., 65 n.l9
justice, 77-78; and ideological posi- Mullen Kraemer, Christine, 100 n.l8,
tions, 75-76; over "Into the Heart of 111 n.2
Africa", 176-77; oflong duration, 70- Museums: and aura, 106; as collectors,
72; its maintenance on public agenda, 104; and consumers, 105-06; and
69-70; and marginal groups, 73; and mood-production, 105-06; and
moral obligations, 81-82; and nation- postmodem sensitivity, 102-03, 176-
al honor, 80-81; nature of private 77
engagement, 83; between Poles and
Jews, 77-78; potential for violence, Namer, Gerard, 130 n.8
71-72; public controversies, 68-71; Native Americans, 82
and resolution, 78-81; responses to Native Canadians, 78, 82; exhibit at
historical grievances, 79-80; rhetoric, Canadian Museum of Civilization,
81; and sense of kinship, 82; betwen 103
Serbs and Croats, 9, 71; over the sig- Neusner, Jacob, 65 n.l8
nificance of memory, 93-94; and so- Niborski, Itzhok, 64 n.lO
cial construction of feelings, 7 4-7 6; Niezabitowska, Malgorzata, 191 n.2
212 Frames of Remembrance

Nora, Pierre, 21 n.8, 100 n.6 Richmond, Marion, 192 n.8

Nostalgia, 106 Riefenstahl, Leni, 177
Rittner, Carol, 84 n.3
Oswiecim, 26. See also Auschwitz Remembrance: as emotional/moral
engagement, 7-8
Paine, Robert, 192 n.ll Reminiscing, 88
Pamyat, 136 Rodney King video, 174 n.9
Passover, 14 Rogers Rubenstein, Betty, 159 n.lO
Patronage. See Sponsorship Roots, 146
Paxton, Robert, 188, 192 n.l7 Roskies, David G., 174 n.2
Pearl Harbour (50th anniversary), 7 Roth, John K., 84 n.3
Persian Gulf war, 169-70 Rousso, Henri, 84 n.8, 131 n.l4, 159 n.5,
Photographs: different ways of seeing, 160 n.22, 192 n.22
178; digital, 174 n.9; by Leni Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto), 68,
Riefenstahl, 177; in Remnants: The 141-42, 176
Last Jews of Poland, 177-78; as sym- Rubenstein, Richard, 31
bolically independent, 176-78
Poland: aid to the Jews, 39; censorship, Samuel, Raphael, 65 n.l4, 100 n.l
186; deconununization, 84 n.9; and Sanger, Margaret, 134
Holocaust memory, 18, 48, 120; Jew Schools: research on, 190-91
as the Other, 142-43; and Jewish Schudson, Michael, 21 n.2, 22 n.l5, 130
memory, 3, 98-99, 117, 122-25, 182; n.9, 159 n.l2
killings of Jews, 124, 131 n.22; Schwartz Cowan, Ruth, 159 n.l3
memory of Communism, 127; Shehan, Thomas, 130 n.ll
memory of struggle with Conununist Shoah, 124, 154, 156-57, 190
regime, 183; memory conflict with Sichrovsky, Peter, 64 n.6
Jews, 77-78; and national honor, 80; Skloot, Robert, 41 n.4
oppositional memory, 137, 173; per- Soldiers' camaraderie, 15-16
ceptions of the Holocaust, 38; ration- Solidarity (Poland), 75
ales for remembering the Holocaust, Sophie's Choice, 159 n.l6
37-38; reaction to Shoah, 190; role of The Sorrow and the Pity, 156-57
collective memory, 92-93; television, Social forgetting: accounting for absen-
173; and Ukrainians, 97; visual ces, 118-20; analysis of, 13-14; at
record of state oppression, 167-68 Auschwitz, 118-19; Austria, 120; be-
Polish Catholic Church: in Auschwitz havioral indications, 124; Canada,
controversy, 69 122; China, 115-16; as constntcted,
Polityka, 111 n.lO 116; as desirable, 126-28; as displace-
Postman, Neil, 160 n.20 ment, 118-120; documenting absen-
Postmodernism: and collective memory, ces, 117-18; Eastern Europe, 126-27;
103; and museums, 102-03 empirical research, 121-26; and for-
Proctor, Robert N., 43 n.22 giveness, 126-27; French intellec-
Psychoanalysis, 20 tuals, 122; Germany, 115; and
historians, 116-17; and ideological
Quebec, 61 positions, 129-30; and international
politics, 128-30; Japan, 120; and jus-
Rabinbach, Anson, 64 n.7, 130 n.2 tice, 127-28; and media, 183; of
Ranger, Terence, 22 n.l7 morally repugnant past, 120-21; as
Remnants: The Last Jews of Poland, noticed absence, 115-17; and oral his-
177-78 tory, 124; during Persian Gulf war,
Remnick, David, 143 n.7 169-70; Poland, 120; and power
 Index 213

structure, 116, 119-20; and private T)>godnik Powszechny, 84 n.3

tellings, 124-25; and psychoanalytic
categories; 116; and psychological Vatican: declarations of sainthood, 128
factors, 116, 130; scientists, 120-21; Verdun, 15
and structures of sensibility, 121-22; Vichy and the Jews, 188
and television, 169-72; and truth, Victimization narratives: exploitive
119; Western intellectuals, 129-30; potential, 60; and moral accounting,
beyond written discourse, 123; 96-97; in Nazi Germany, 58; and
Soviet Union: and censorship, 186; glas- Other, 60; plausibility, 59; rallying
nost/memory, 136-37; and memory power, 58; and shared suffering, 59-
conflict, 72-73; victimization narra- 60; in Soviet Union, 58; uses of, 18;
tives, 58 and women's movement, 59; and
Spiegelman, Art, 160 n.24 workers' movement, 59
Sponsorship: mixed, 186-87; state, 186; Vidai-Naquet, Pierre, 84 n.4
and works' authority, 187 Vietnam War: echoes, 4; soldiers'
Starn, Randolph, 21 n.l stories, 16; as moral trauma, 50-51;
Steiner, George, 31 veterans, 8, 48, 52, 164
Sternhell, Zeev, 100 n.l6 Vietnam War Memorial (New York), 5,
Stone, Oliver, 5, 6, 48 68
Vietnam War Memorial (Washington,
Tannay, Emanuel, 64 n.2 D.C.), 13, 51, 68, 138, 150
Tee, Nechama, 42 n.6 Vilnius, 180
Television: claims to societal repre-
sentation, 172-73; claims to truth, Wajda, Andrzej, 167
155-56, 168-69; control over, 172; Ward, John, 43 n.23
differences in its importance, 17; Warsaw, 3
forging emotional ties, 171-72; Warsaw ghetto: creating records, 163;
global coverage, 170-71; as impact- honoring of fighters, 28; memory of,
ing commemorations in Japan, 16; in 24
North America, 169-170; selection Weimann, Gabriel, 43 n.22
principles, 170; and social forgetting, Weinfeld, Morton, 42 n.21, 84 n.lO, 100
16, 169-72; struggle for control, 169; n.lO
docudramas, 5 Weschler, Lawrence, 100 n.12
"Texts": and authors, 6; multiple Wetenhall, John, 21 n.lO, 143 n.lO, 159
reinterpretations, 7; readings, 5-6; n.3, 174 n.12
situating in context, 14-15, 17 Wickham, Chris, 22 n.l6, 131 n.2l, 159
Thelen, David, 159 n.4 n.l8
Thompson, Paul, 65 n.l4, 100 n.l Wiesel, Elie, 27, 31, 154, 183
Tourist guidebooks: staking "ownership Wieviorka, Annette, 64 n.lO
claims", 180 Williams, Raymond, 131 n.l5
Tourism industry, 106-07 Winn, Conrad, 43 n.22
Traumas: defined away, 18; survivors' Women's movement: and victimization
memories, 48; and formation of com- narratives, 59; radical feminists, 60.
munities of memory, 47-52. See also See also Feminism
gulag, Holocaust, Holocaust World War I: effects on European cul-
memory, Vietnam War, World War I, ture, 53-54
World War II World War II: aftermath, 3. See also
Tradition, 92 France, Germany, Holocaust, Poland
Troper, Harold, 42 n.21, 84 n.lO, 100 Wright, Ronald, 192 n.l3
n.lO
214 Frames of Remembrance

Yerushalmi, YosefHayim, 65 n.17 Zemon Davis, Natalie, 21 n.1

Young, Brigitte, 84 n.7 Zipes, Jack, 64 n.7, 130 n.2
Young, James E., 144 n.17, 159 n.ll Zuckerman, Bruce, 41 n.3
Zundel, Ernst, 35
Zelizer, Barbie, 159 n.8, 174 n.10