Remembering and Rethinking the GDR

Multiple Perspectives and Plural Authenticities

A. Saunders, D. Pinfold, A. Saunders, D. Pinfold

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137292094
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

Exploring the ways in which the GDR has been remembered since its demise in 1989/90, this volume asks how memory of the former state continues to shape contemporary Germany. Its contributors offer multiple perspectives on the GDR and offer new insights into the complex relationship between past and present.

Part I

Theoretical Reflections

1

The GDR and the Memory Debate

Silke Arnold-de Simine and Susannah Radstone

This chapter will consider what it might mean to ‘remember’ the GDR after the fall of the Berlin Wall, setting out the theoretical concepts which have underpinned the discussions of the research network ‘After the Wall: Reconstructing and Representing the GDR’. We will contextualise those theoretical concepts in a changing global landscape of remembrance in which understandings of what constitutes knowledge of the past and what it means to relate to the past in a meaningful way have shifted radically.

At face value the main concern in the fierce and often polemical debates surrounding the ways in which the GDR is remembered and represented in the public domain seems to be the question of ‘historical accuracy’: different memory communities accuse each other of not being able or prepared to face up to others’, or indeed their own, past experiences of the GDR. This is paralleled in other debates that touch on the relations between history and memory, but for memory scholars interested in different practices, activities, forms and media of memory, it is only half the story: equally important is the question of why some aspects of the past are constantly revisited and discussed while others are purposefully repressed or involuntarily forgotten. Memory, in whichever form, is not a window onto the past; rather our vision of the past is constantly adapted to our needs in the present. Memory discourses mediate between our experience or knowledge of the past and the problems we face negotiating the present, and as such they are at the same time unreliable and yet significant (see Chapter 2). Memory research is therefore concerned with the analysis of memory narratives and debates with the aim of investigating the interpenetrative relationships between memory and identity, memory and social belonging, and memory and politics. Rather than being concerned with ‘true history’, memory research is interested in ‘lived history’ (Passerini, 1983, 1987; Portelli, 2003). To ask about ‘memory’ means to analyse how people experience, relate to and narrativise the past. This is one of the reasons why memory research opened up new directions in literary and film studies, approaching texts as ‘memory texts’ rather than as reflections, however mediated, of historical actuality. This does not imply that in studying memory, scholarship has given up on ‘historical facts’; it means that in memory research, it is the processes by which individuals, communities and societies manufacture emotionally invested narratives of the past for themselves that are investigated and analysed.

Memory research does not focus exclusively either on the effects of the past on the present (determinist approach) or on the ways in which the present shapes understandings of the past (constructivist approach). Memory is understood to emerge through the mutual interactions of the past on the present and of the present on the past. Memory research does not simply complement more conventional historical approaches; it encourages reflection on our emotional and ideological investment in the past. Therefore it is inherently interdisciplinary, but at the same time concepts of memory cannot simply be translated or transferred either between disciplines or from one historical period to another: ‘Memory has signified, and continues to signify, different phenomena in different historical situations, and within different theoretical or disciplinary paradigms’ (Radstone and Schwarz, 2010: 7).

The so-called ‘memory boom’ (Huyssen, 1995) is more or less contemporaneous with the caesura on which this volume focuses: ‘After the Wall’ identifies a time before and a time after, and it suggests that special efforts are needed to bridge this particular temporal chasm. The ‘memory boom’ signifies a more general development in which, over recent decades, the prominence and significance of memory has risen across both the academy and culture. While western societies seem increasingly obsessed with relating to the past through the framework of memory, there is no shortage of criticism of what is seen by some as an excessive preoccupation with memory. For others the current concern with memory is best understood in relation to memory’s increasing fragility. Following these analyses, recent history has been figured in relation to a series of losses, the corruption and decimation of memory (Terdiman, 1993). At the same time the engagement with memory also speculates on the possibilities for retrieval and redemption. Memory is seen by some as a redemptive force that can unlock a moment in the past. According to certain scholars, Walter Benjamin, whose work has had a profound influence on recent memory scholarship (Leslie, 2010), attributed a redemptive force to memory (Wolin, 1994), whereas others, such as Peter Osborne (1994: 87), refute this reading:

Redemption itself, in the strict, absolute or Messianic sense, is not at stake. In this, Benjamin’s later work remains steadfastly at one with his earlier writings, and with Scholem’s nihilistic understanding of the Messianic idea. There is no redemption within historical time, only the redemption of history as a whole.

These divergent readings of Benjamin form part of a broader debate within which the alignment of memory with redemption is by no means unchallenged.

As the end of history has been proclaimed (through, for example, the concept of posthistoire; Baudrillard, 2001: 263) and the loss of historical consciousness deplored (Jameson, 1991), memory seems to have stepped into the breach and taken centre stage, both as a cultural preoccupation and, in consequence, as a theoretical concept in the humanities. However, according to critics such as Pierre Nora, ‘we speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left’ (1989: 7). This ‘memory’, which is the reaction to a perceived acceleration of time and to rapid change, is not even the genuine article (milieux de memoire). Rather, it is some kind of artificial substitute (lieux de memoire): modern society has become cut off from its past, and traditions are not ‘organically’ passed on but have to be ‘artificially’ recreated to be remembered, such as in museums or memorials.

Whatever the controversies around memory, there seems to be an agreement that the current academic preoccupation with memory emerges from an apparent paradox or contradiction: it is partly owing to the fear that memory is fragile and elusive, and therefore requires special efforts to be preserved, and partly to the sense that memory, rather than history, has become the dominant mode in which western societies relate to and frame the past tout court (Huyssen, 1995: 5). Pitting memory against history too absolutely risks setting up a false and oversimplified polarisation that sees history as striving for the ideals of analysis, criticism and intersubjective argumentation, and equates it with disinterested objectivity, detachedness and a clear distinction between past and present. From that point of view, relegating something completely to the realm of historical knowledge seems nothing short of shying away from an ethical responsibility towards the past. In addition, the memory boom is also linked to democratic renewal: by remembering their pasts, different groups, including minorities, are able to gain a voice, resulting in a plurality of memories in an expanded and possibly more democratic public sphere. But this development also creates different memory communities that promote their own narratives and fight for their recognition in the public realm.

The rise of memory in culture does not simply give voice to people’s memories, provide exciting new projects in the memorial landscape or provoke new theories in memory research: it also presents scholars with a fresh set of questions. But instead of simply embracing the perspective of memory in academic work, scholars of the memory boom, and those deploying memory in diverse modes of theory and method, need to adopt a reflexive approach by questioning what the focus on memory reveals, while bearing in mind what it might screen. Thus, as suggested above, the tendency to pit memory against history, whether in action or in research, may come at the cost of screening areas of ambiguity.

In the second section of this chapter we move on to explore what memory research may contribute to studies of ‘After the Wall’. We suggest that a memory studies perspective throws light, precisely, on the Wall’s ‘afterlife’, understood as a dynamic process of remembering that can be grasped fully neither by a constructivist nor by a determinist analysis. We also suggest that, from the perspective of memory research, current disputes over memorialising the GDR find one context in the binarisms of memory discourses in general. Furthermore, we suggest that memory research enables an exploration of the instrumentalisation of memory, and sheds light on Ostalgie’s politics of desire. But before we can elaborate those arguments more fully, we need to address the question of memory beyond the personal.

Is there such a thing as ‘collective memory’?

In everyday life as well as in scholarly approaches, the term ‘memory’ has more than one referent. Most commonly it stands for a neurophysiological capacity which resides with the individual and allows the recall of personal experiences which, if not preserved, will die along with the individual. But the term has also come to indicate a formation of social and cultural practices which extend individual memory beyond first-hand experiences (Cubitt, 2007: 1). At the beginning of the twentieth century, Maurice Halbwachs argued that there can be no neat separation between what he termed ‘individual’ and ‘collective’ memory: remembering is a social practice and individual memory can only be developed and fostered in a social context. In Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925), he explored the social construction and contextualisation of different forms of memory. Since the 1980s, when his theories were rediscovered, advocates, but also critics, have tried to build on and fine-tune his concept of ‘collective memory’.¹ Some critics, such as Susan Sontag (2003) and Reinhard Koselleck (2004: 3), claim that only the individual neurophysiological capacity to remember should be called ‘memory’ and that it is misleading to talk about collective acts of ‘remembering’ when the term can at best only be used in a metaphorical sense and at worst creates a smoke screen for the political and ideological instrumentalisation of memory. Sontag suggests the term ‘collective instruction’ (Sontag, 2003: 76) rather than ‘collective memory’, which shifts the focus to questions about authority and ideology – that is, who is instructing, who is instructed and for what purpose? (Foucault, 1975). More recently, however, Olick et al. have defended the usefulness of the term ‘collective memory’. Though they come close to replacing it with ‘social memory’ and though they argue that ‘collective memory’ may lack philosophical or operational precision (2011: 40), their retention of the term points back to the important insight bequeathed to us by Halbwachs that, given memory’s social frameworks, ‘the very distinction between the individual and social components of remembering ceases to make absolute sense.’ (ibid.: 19).

Mediated representations constitute key dimensions of memory’s social framework. Individual memories may refer to events witnessed – for example, on TV – which individuals did not live through, but to which they nevertheless relate in a personal and emotional way, treating them as meaningful stories which help them to define their identity, rather than as collectively constructed and acquired knowledge about the past. It seems that audiences are able to relate to certain representations, re-creations and re-enactments of the past in a way which creates not only knowledge but also a sense of belonging to a past which involves a strong emotional investment, sometimes to an extent that suggests the imaginative reliving of a past which was not even experienced first hand. In enabling individuals to transcend their life-span and feel a sense of attachment to the past, this kind of memory acquires an almost spiritual quality but has also been described as ‘inauthentic’ (Nora, 1989) or ‘prosthetic’ (Landsberg, 2004), depending on the theorist’s more pessimistic or optimistic assessment of its function for the individual and for society.

Rather than being acquired through the first-hand experience of events, these memories are adopted and can therefore hardly grant the same sense of belonging as experiential, embodied memory – or can they? What happens when ‘prosthetic memories’ overwrite first-hand memories? Or is this simply an artificial division? Memory scholars are split between those who, having accepted the argument that there is a growing trend of memory acquisition, point to its potential to smooth out, or even erase, memories that might trouble a unified narrative of the nation (Burgoyne, 1997: 104–19) and those who think it provides a chance for empathic understanding and solidarity beyond one’s own geographically and temporally limited communities (Landsberg, 2004). Public remembrance culture seems to be caught up in an ethical dilemma: to allow memories to fade away with their owners is deemed irresponsible and even a potential danger to democracy; but the decision to hang on to certain memories (and not to others) involves processes of identification, selection and mediation, which also pose ethical challenges.

The question of how we can legitimately lay claim to memories – our own or those of others – poses a problem for neuroscientists and psychologists, but it also has an ethical dimension. People who, for reasons of amnesia, trauma or repression, are dispossessed of their memories are faced with the problem of how they might recover and rightfully claim them. We can also be haunted by memories of events we did not live through: Marianne Hirsch (1997, 1999) introduced the term ‘post-memory’ for the second and third generations of Holocaust survivors who grew up with the legacy of the trauma, suggesting that post-memory can even extend beyond those who have familial links to the Holocaust. Like so many concepts in memory studies, this emerged in the context of Holocaust studies but soon gained a wider application. Individuals can be dispossessed of their family memories by a diasporic existence or by historical and ideological ruptures which stigmatise their memories as taboo. On the other side of the spectrum there is the issue of ‘memory theft’, a more or less conscious appropriation of memories that can include deceiving oneself or others about their genuineness. The issues around the ethics of memory appropriation have been explored in such diverse arenas as debates around false memory syndrome (e.g. Bruno Grosjean/Binjamin Wilkomirski’s fictional memoir Bruchstücke. Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948, 1995),² Hollywood films (e.g. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, 1982/1992), and literary texts (e.g. W.G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten, 1992).³ These examples have triggered discussions around questions of who has a right to certain memories, who is allowed to pass them on, and in which form they should, or can successfully, be passed on.

Memory scholars investigate very different things: how memories are generated on the level of individuals, groups, societies and nations, how they are constructed, transmitted and transformed by media and how, within all of these domains, they are reconstructed retrospectively according to present norms, aims, visions and projects. When analysing these social and cultural practices and texts by which a collectively shared sense of the past is being generated, negotiated and communicated, the concept of ‘memory’ that we are working with needs to be defined and the conceptual tools developed.

‘Collective’ or ‘cultural memory’ can only ever indicate memorial processes that pass through social formations. Some scholars navigate the grey zone between individual and collective memory by insisting on a clear separation between the two, locating the former firmly in the body and the latter in different kinds of media. We ought to distinguish between ‘memory’ as a capacity or activity on the one hand and as concrete practices or texts of memory, such as testimonies or memoirs, on the other (Radstone, 2005: 134). For Jan and Aleida Assmann, collective memory is constructed and passed on by social, political and cultural institutions and can therefore only exist in some kind of mediated form. According to Aleida Assmann (2008: 1), ‘experiential memories are embodied and thus they cannot be transferred from one person to another’. But she also concedes that ‘our personal memories include much more th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: ‘Wissen wie es war’?
• Part I: Theoretical Reflections
• Part II: Narrative Frameworks of Memory
• Part III: Beyond Nostalgia
• Part IV: Past Memories for Present Concerns
• Part V: Memories in Private and Public
• Index