Nation and Memory in

Eastern Europe
(19th and 20th century)

Christoph Mick

Lecture 3
Memory and Memorial Culture

Week 5
 Outline
1. Memory and Nation
2. Collective Memory
3. Pierre Nora and “les lieux de memoire“
4. Conclusion
“A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two
things, which in truth are but one, constitute
this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the
past, one in the present. One is the possession
in common of a rich legacy of memories; the
other is present-day consent, the desire to live
together, the will to perpetuate the value of the
heritage that one has received in an undivided
form”

Ernest Renan
 “ethnies are constituted, not by lines of physical
descent, but by the sense of continuity, shared
memory and collective destiny, i.e. by lines of
cultural affinity embodied in myths, memories,
symbols and values retained by a given cultural
unit of population.”

A.D. Smith, National Identity, p. 29

 Ethno-Symbolism
• Modern nations and pre-modern ethnies
are linked
• Ethnies are crucial for the formation of
nations
• Myths, symbols, folk tales, histories,
memories, cultural traditions play
important roles in transforming ethnies in
nations
• They are the basis for social cohesion
 Outline
1. Memory and Nation
2. Collective Memory
3. Pierre Nora and “les lieux de memoire“
4. Conclusion
 Collective Memory
Concept introduced by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in 1925,
based on ideas of Emile Durkheim

Individual Memory Collective Memory

Personal, autobiographic Social, historical

Memory of things I have Incorporates information

experienced myself, about the world beyond
where I have been my experience, before I
present was born or where I
have not been present
Social framework of Constitutes a kind of
remembering social framework
Maurice Halbwachs Emile Durkheim,
1877-1945 1858-1917
 Multiplicity of Memory

We can understand each memory as it occurs in individual

thought only if we locate each within the thought of the
corresponding group. We cannot properly understand their
relative strength and the ways in which they combine within
individual thought unless we connect the individual to the
various groups of which he is simultaneously a member.

Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago,

1992), p.53
 Collective Memory

• Individual remains the real holder of memory

• Memory changes over time
• The collective (family, class, religious community, nation)
decides what is valuable to remember
• Cultural memory is based on socially organised
mnemonics, institutions, and media

Memory is a social product - Individual memory is

dependent on society
“For this purpose we should conceptualize collective
memory as the result of the interaction among three types
of historical factors: the intellectual and cultural traditions
that frame all our representations of the past, the memory
makers who selectively adopt and manipulate these
traditions, and the memory consumers who use, ignore or
transform such artifacts according to their own interests.”

Wulf Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in memory: A

Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies,”
History and Theory 41 (May 2002), pp. 197-197
 Jan and Aleida Assmann

Communicative Memory – everyday communication,

temporal horizon of eighty to hundred years, strongly
influenced by contemporaries of the remembered events

Collective Memory – strengthen the bond of the collective,

mediate a collective identity, social product

Cultural Memory – “body of reusable texts, images, and

rituals specific to each society in each epoch, whose
‘cultivation’ serves to stabilize and convey that society’s
self-image.”

Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,”

New German Critique 65 (1995), p. 132
 Collective Memory and Commemoration

Publicly shared memories are shaped by ceremonies,

cemeteries, museums, symbols, public holidays,
monuments

Construction and identity of groups

 Outline
1. Memory and Nation
2. Collective Memory
3. Pierre Nora and “les lieux de memoire“
4. Conclusion
Les lieux de mémoire – sites of memory (Pierre Nora)

Three periods of the history of memory:

- Premodern, natural relation between people and their

past, milieu de mémoire (environments of memory) sustain
traditions and rituals,
- Modern (19th c.) Old traditions lost their meaning,
reconstruction of tradition by elites, production of sites of
memory in language, monument, and archives to secure
the future of the nation state
- Postmodern: second reconstruction after the collapse of
the ideology of the nation state

Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de

Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989), pp. 7-24
Les lieux de mémoire – sites of memory (Pierre Nora)

“If we were able to live within memory, we would

not have needed to consecrate lieux de mémoire
in its name. Each gesture, down to the most
everyday, would be experienced as the ritual
repetition of a timeless practice in a primordial
identification of act and meaning”
Les lieux de mémoire – sites of memory (Pierre Nora)

“There are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory,

because there are no longer milieux de mémoire,
real environments of memory”
Les lieux de mémoire – sites of memory (Pierre Nora)
Functions

• To stop time
• To block the work of forgetting
• To establish a state of things
• To immortalize death
• To materialize the material

to capture a maximum of meaning

in the fewest of signs
Les lieux de mémoire – sites of memory (Pierre Nora)
History and Memory

“Memory installs remembrance within the sacred;

history, always prosaic, releases it again. Memory
is blind to all but the group it binds… At the heart
of history is a critical discourse that is antithetical
to spontaneous memory, History is perpetually
suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to
suppress and destroy it.”
 Collective Memory vs. History
• Identity project (usually a
picture of heroism,
victimhood, etc.)
• Impatient with ambiguity
• Ignores counterevidence
in order to preserve
established narrative
• Aspires to arrive at
objective truth, regardless
of consequences
• Recognizes complexity
and ambiguity
• May revise existing
narrative in light of new
evidence (archives, etc.)

But… is this dichotomy true? What are the functions of history and
historical research in nation building?
From: Voices of Collective Remembering, Universitetet i Oslo, May 2004, by
James V. Wertsch, Washington University in St. Louis
The past is constructed not as fact
but as myth to serve the interest
of a particular community

Alon Confino
 No sharp dichotomy between official
(manipulative) and vernacular (authentic)
memory

“How did people internalize the nation and make

it in remarkably short time an everyday mental
property – a memory as intimate and authentic
as the local, ethnic, and family past?“
Alon Confino, Collective Memory and Cultural
History, p. 1402
 Outline
1. Memory and Nation
2. Collective Memory
3. Pierre Nora and “les lieux de memoire“
4. Conclusion
National memory ... is constituted by different,
often opposing, memories that, in spite of their
rivalries, construct common denominators that
overcome on the symbolic level real social and
political differences to create an imagined
community

Alon Confino, Collective Memory and Cultural

History, p.1400