Memory, History, Nation

Contested Pasts

Susannah Radstone, Susannah Radstone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351505925
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In the last decade, a focus on memory in the human sciences has encouraged new approaches to the study of the past. As the humanities and social sciences have put into question their own claims to objectivity, authority, and universality, memory has appeared to offer a way of engaging with knowledge of the past as inevitably partial, subjective, and local. At the same time, memory and memorial practices have become sites of contestation, and the politics of memory are increasingly prominent. This inter-disciplinary volume demonstrates, from a range of perspectives, the complex cultural work and struggles over meaning that lie at the heart of what we call memory.The chapters in this volume offer a complex awareness of the workings of memory, and the ways in which different or changing histories may be explained. They explore the relation between individual and social memory, between real and imaginary, event and fantasy, history and myth. Contradictory accounts, or memories in direct contradiction to the historical record are not always the sign of a repressive authority attempting to cover something up. The tension between memory as a safeguard against attempts to silence dissenting voices, and memory's own implication in that silencing, runs throughout the book. Topics covered range from the Basque country to Cambodia, from Hungary to South Africa, from the Finnish Civil War to the cult Jim Jarmusch movie Dead Man, from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to Australia. Part I, ""Transforming Memory"" is concerned primarily with the social and personal transmission of memory across time and generations. Part II, ""Remembering Suffering: Trauma and History, "" brings the after-effects of catastrophe to the fore. Part III, ""Patterning the National Past, "" the relation between nation and memory is the central issue. Part IV, ""And Then Silence, "" reflects on the complex and multiple meaning of silence and oblivion, wherein amnesia is often used as a figure for the denial of shamefu

Part I
TRANSFORMING MEMORY

Introduction

Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone

The past is not fixed, but is subject to change: both narratives of events and the meanings given to them are in a constant state of transformation. The essays in this first section engage with the ways in which memories of a given event or period change over time, as the event changes meaning; their focus is on memory as process, as something constantly being reworked. An event, an emotion remembered, inevitably cannot have the same meaning retrospectively as it had at the time, weighted as the memory must be with everything that has happened subsequently, with the changing needs and imperatives of times and peoples. These essays trace the ways in which memories of particular periods and events are differently articulated and represented in relation to those changing needs. At the same time the essays are confronting the problems of thinking through memory as at once individual and collective, public and private. The protean shapes of memory in this part emerge through many different media: individual consciousness and state institution, local legend and official memorial, family stories, newspapers, television. Memory in these discussions is visibly both an individual and a collective possession, so to speak; it is shared, transmitted, expressed, in various and complicated ways.

Thus on the one hand, the essays are very directly concerned with memory in culture; for the transformations under discussion are implicated in the processes of social and political change. But it is significant that in all these discussions personal memory, personal testimony even, occupies a central place; or perhaps that the two become increasingly hard to disentangle. The pooling of memory in Hirsch and Spitzer’s account of ‘postmemory’ is one variant; the sense in Portelli’s discussion that individual memories have become overlaid with an authorised social version is another. Rituals, memorials, folktales, television, all articulate versions of memory in which individuals may or may not recognise themselves, or find the story that fits their need. Shared memory, as it appears in several of these pieces, is something almost animate: it is a dynamic shaping force, which is capable of transforming both the narrative of what is remembered, and the individual subjects who do the remembering, as the meaning and content of their own memories change.

In Alessandro Portelli’s account of the afterlife of a famous massacre in German-occupied Rome during the Second World War, memory is deeply but fascinatingly compromised. In the case he analyses, a firmly held and near-universal popular conviction about the course of events leading up to the massacre is wrong; and wrong in a way that specifically throws a greater burden of guilt for what happened onto the members of the Italian resistance movement, away from the German military who were the actual perpetrators. The question he asks, then, is how a memory so radically mistaken has come into being.

As Porteiii explains, the dominant memory of the event in Rome flies in the face of the official documentary record. Working from a ‘traditional’ oral history standpoint, it might be assumed that popular memory serves to put documentary evidence into question; if the majority of the city’s population tells a story that contradicts the historical record, that record should be subjected to scrutiny. In this instance, on the contrary, it is popular memory itself that appears compromised and problematic, since even those who were alive at the time and witnesses to the course of events regularly produce the ‘wrong’ account of what happened. But Portelli’s argument also throws up complex questions about precisely the relation between social and individual memory. For if an individual’s memory were simply the repository of the ‘true’ story, able to measure alternative accounts against experiential knowledge and find them wanting, then the reshapings and revisions of the story of the massacre could have gained no purchase in the minds of those who ‘saw what happened’; whereas on the contrary, the secondary version has become rooted as firm conviction precisely because people who were there ‘remember’ it.

What makes this episode still more inexplicable is that at first sight not much seems to depend on it, politically speaking; on the contrary, indeed, this is a version that favours those who should be the enemy (Germans) against those who should be the heroes (partisans), and that seems to have gained currency without any particular agent visible behind it. There is no obvious political or state agenda behind the dissemination of the new version. Nonetheless, Porteiii argues, this is not to say that there is no politics, broadly speaking, in the fact that the revisionary version gained the upper hand in popular memory. He reads this revision in relation to the complex political readjustments of the Italian state after the war, and how it went about making a new identity. In producing itself as a European liberal democracy in the post-war period, he suggests, Italy had to negotiate some peculiarly complex relationships with past and present political allegiances. Its own fascist past was one problem, of course; another was the prominence of communism in the resistance movement, at a time of cold war anti-communism. The changes in the meaning and the memory of the massacre in subsequent decades, he argues, are implicated in the social and political priorities of the newly reformed state, not at the level of government plot, but through a process of reinvention of national identity. ‘Society’ does not remake itself as an abstract entity; if social/political transformation is to succeed, there must be corresponding transformations at the level of individual consciousness - as revolutionaries have always known. Thus, presumably, the shifts and displacements going on in thousands of different Roman memories, the number of conversations reaching for the conclusion, ‘of course, it must have been like that, somehow I’d forgotten’, all adding up to a new popular knowledge.

In Anne Heimo and Ulla-Maija Peltonen’s investigation of popular memory in Finland, what is in question is not the misremembering of a specific event, but rather contradictory ways of remembering a whole period: the Civil War of 1920 and the years after. Here again we see the construction of memory working on different levels. The inequity of the way in which the war was publicly remembered in its immediate aftermath, they suggest, as well as the general silencing of debate on the subject in subsequent decades, had a great deal to do with the persisting bitterness of those who lost. Public institutions, initially triumphalist, shifted towards a rhetoric of silence and amnesia in the name of national unity, which in its turn with difficulty gave way to an acceptance that there were stories still to be told, and memorials still to be erected, decades after the event. Working with archives of spoken and written words collected over a period between forty to seventy years after the war, Heimo and Peltonen examine the different stories told in relation to the changing emotional and political needs of the tellers. The meanings of the stories change as the ‘rememberers’ get further and further away, and start being rememberers for their families, say, or re-narrators of heard stories, even while for many the sense that they are at last bringing into the open unspoken and unchanged truths remains important.

Heimo and Peltonen’s particular interest is in the forms memory takes, and the many different instances in which one can read the traces of these conflicting accounts. Their discussion is concerned with Oral history’ and ‘folklore’ simultaneously, seeing both as forms for the expression of popular memory. Folk stories and local legends demonstrate the villainy of one side or another through ghosts or through individual tragedies. The political content need not be explicit for them to work as statements about injustice or persecution or bloodthirstiness; on the other hand, their changing forms, and the disappearance of particular tales over the years, can be interpreted in relation to changing cultural needs. In effect, while Heimo and Peltonen describe a continuing and visible difference in the versions of tales (’Red’ and ‘White’) told by each side, they also describe eventually a common changing emphasis, by which the stories are more concerned to locate the source of trouble ‘elsewhere’, rather than within the village. From being tales of the villainy of one’s neighbour, these become tales of outsiders bringing disruption and distress. Thus they become as it were conciliatory: instead of perpetuating bitter memories of treachery near at hand, they project it outside. Over a few generations, it seems, memories can be transformed into shapes that are no longer internally damaging to the community. Like Portelli’s, then, this essay poses the question of what oral history can deliver, and explores the ways in which memories may be read as narratives of meaning rather than event.

Graham Carr, also working with conflicts over the retrospective meanings of war, focuses not on changes over several decades, but on a particular upheaval in the public memory of the Second World War in Canada. The popular myth of the war, he suggests, has represented it as a time of national heroism, unity and mission, as well as a crucial moment in the history of Canadian national self-consciousness and self-confidence. The challenge to that consensual narrative by historians questioning the actual degree of unity, heroism and so forth in the armed forces (were relations between officers and men always happy? What about the bombing of civilians?) might have had little public impact if it had been simply a matter of historians writing obscure academic books. However, the fact that it had national exposure in the form of a TV series sparked off an angry national debate which effectively pitched the wounded and insulted memories of the old against the ignorant academicism of the young(ish).

This public row, Carr argues, was framed as an argument both about the memories of individuals and about the place of the war in Canada’s national memory. As the debate proceeded, it became clear that it had peculiarly personalised and domestic resonances: the images appealed to were the anguish of veterans over how to speak to their grandchildren, and the contrast between Vietnam objector and Second World War soldier. To mobilise a rhetoric of memory here, once again, is antipathetic to critical inquiry: so long as the war exists in a register of memory rather than history then personal experience will be the touchstone. Precisely because the front man for the TV series had never fought in a war, by implication, he ought to show humility in front of those who had.

Carr’s account of this contest continues with a more general examination of the ways in which Canada, as its old soldiers get older and start to die, has increasingly positioned its war experience as a baton to be passed from one generation to the next; the memory is almost reified, no longer purely attached to an individual and his experience, but transmitted as a national property. Looking at different instances of the way the war and its aftermath is represented in Canadian culture - from advertising to education to keeping of memorial days - Carr identifies this generational transmission and its attached generational bonding as a key element. Memory will outlive the survivors if it can be passed on whole to their descendants or to other young people; thus any lack of respect for the exact truth of that memory (of heroism) is a grievous national insult.

One might see it almost as a denial of generational difference and the passage of time: it is the middle generation, the sons of the soldiers, who are seen to reject the dominant accounts, but they are being sidelined by an attempt to recuperate the grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. To identify oneself with a generation, Pierre Nora suggests, is to think horizontally rather than vertically; it is an index of the relative weakening of the traditional vertical structures that worked to secure identity (families, in particular, but other cross-generational structures too), in favour of a relation to the past that is determined by identification with the present.¹ The struggle over the ‘inheritance’ of memory in such instances, however, suggests the possibility of rethinking generation as precisely the locus of transmission, rather than seeing generations as (self-)defined in opposition to their predecessors.

Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s chapter takes up the question of how memories are transmitted from one generation to the next, and what is at stake in that transmission, at a more intimate level: within a family, what is passed on, and what effect does it have? How does the next generation live with their parents’ stories? The chapter thus stages a dialogue between generations about choices and chance; also about place and belonging. For Hirsch and Spitzer it has a particular application, in that the parental knowledge is of disaster and loss (as well as being the story of how the disaster was escaped). The concept of postmemory articulates the particular insistence of such memories of loss in the second generation. Escape may not be all it seems, and the children will carry that past forward into the future; their sense of belonging is partial, insecure; their sense of self is haunted by memories which are not quite their own. What is transmitted above all, it seems, is a s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction: Contested pasts
• Part I Transforming memory
• Part II Remembering suffering: trauma and history
• Part III Patterning the national past
• Part IV And then silence …
• Index